Congruent shapes activity
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2013.03.28 18:27 atchka This sub is no longer in use. Please visit /r/HealthAtEverySize.
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2016.04.06 20:14 Mol-Eliza The Mol Eliza Empire Guild, taking the empire over one Mol Eliza at a time
Mol Eliza Empire's private subreddit, safe from the FiftyShadesofRey spies.
2024.04.29 00:40 Lieutenant-Speed How is the day-to-day of a reserve 68w
Hey everyone. Looking to join as a 68w. I was going to a year ago but had some major personal life changes and decided to delay it a while. Now I’m getting back on track. Got some weight to lose and gotta get back in shape, but I’ll get there. I’m an AEMT currently as a civilian.
Anyways, when I was going to join before, my recruiter took me to visit the reserve unit I’d be in. Seemed like a pretty chill unit from an outside perspective, but I also only saw it for a couple hours. I don’t know a ton about the different types of units, and I don’t remember what he called it. Every 68w I met that day was active duty. All had great things to say. I’m just curious what it’ll be like as a reservist? What do drill weekends look like in the reserves? I realize this probably varies unit to unit, but I’ll take any advice you can give.
submitted by Lieutenant-Speed to 68w [link] [comments]
Anyways, when I was going to join before, my recruiter took me to visit the reserve unit I’d be in. Seemed like a pretty chill unit from an outside perspective, but I also only saw it for a couple hours. I don’t know a ton about the different types of units, and I don’t remember what he called it. Every 68w I met that day was active duty. All had great things to say. I’m just curious what it’ll be like as a reservist? What do drill weekends look like in the reserves? I realize this probably varies unit to unit, but I’ll take any advice you can give.
2024.04.29 00:23 Jguy8969 If I’m worthy of love, why does it allude me?
Seriously, if I am truly worthy of love, like we tell every human being, then why have I never experienced it? It’s kind of hard to feel worthy of something you’ve never experienced while everyone else has. I’m in my mid 20’s, never been in a relationship, never had a first kiss. People tell you gotta work on yourself first. I did that. I’m doing that. I’m in great shape, got a good job, take care of myself mentally and physically. Doesn’t change anything. People say you gotta not care and then love finds you. Lies. If this really is something every human being is worthy of, then why does it feel like the universe is actively working against me? The stress of family and friends constantly asking me why I haven’t found anyone feels like a ship is laying on my back. Being single and lonely doesn’t make me less of a person, but being told I’m worthy of love and never coming close does.
submitted by Jguy8969 to lonely [link] [comments]
2024.04.29 00:04 Expert-Egg3111 What do I need to work on to not feel so tight in my (groin?)?
I was doing mountain climbers and the muscles on the front side of my leg (where your upper leg and lower hips meet) that drive your legs forward felt super tight and severely more fatigued then the rest of my body.
If it’s still a little confusing it’s the muscles you feel activated when you sit down with your legs in front of you (making an L shape) and have something like a drinking glass in front of you and you lift your foot from one side, over the glass to the other.
What weakness is this and what can I do to fix it?
submitted by Expert-Egg3111 to askfitness [link] [comments]
If it’s still a little confusing it’s the muscles you feel activated when you sit down with your legs in front of you (making an L shape) and have something like a drinking glass in front of you and you lift your foot from one side, over the glass to the other.
What weakness is this and what can I do to fix it?
2024.04.28 23:52 mooshwa Official Twenty One Pilots Clancy Lore Megathread: Early DMAORG to Red Taped Albums
 | PART ONE: CLANCY LORE MEGATHREAD submitted by mooshwa to twentyonepilots [link] [comments] *last updated 4/28/2024 @ 5:30 pm EST ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hello all! This is a full, easily digestible thread detailing the confirmed bulk of the current twenty one pilots lore spanning over the last 7 years for all to catch up on. *THIS IS A REUPLOAD. reddit is glitching like crazy and disabled editing on the last thread (and the one I just posted too) so this is still the same one from February! **Please read this if you are new to the community or just want to get caught up before posting in case your question is answered in this thread.*\* Part 2 of the lore continued here! last updated 4/28/2024 @ 5:30 pm EST We are continuously discussing this in the official discord, come join! Confirmed Fake Sources Clancy Tour Info/Discussion I will update this as time goes on! All information was gathered from discord clique, http://dmaorg.info/found/15398642_14/clancy.html and twentyonepilots.com thread made by u/mooshwa *Trigger warning for heavy topics such as suicide and self-harm\* ______________________________________________ Blurryface Music Videos/ Important info going inOn 3/16/2015, "Fairly Local" was uploaded to youtube, shoeing in a brand new dark and disturbing era for twenty one pilots. It took place in a frozen and abandoned building, and featured the vocalist, Tyler, in red contacts with his hands and neck covered in black, almost as if the color was swallowing him. It also featured Josh, the drummer, with red hair and intense red eyeshadow playing his drum set while it flew way from him. The video showcased a deep battle between two forces controlling Tyler. Someone named Blurryface, and his actual self. The color red is extremely important in this story, and is always associated with Blurryface and evil. In "Heavydirtysoul" we saw Tyler being driven by an unseen figure, and later on the car caught on fire before almost hitting Josh in the middle of the road, who was also playing a flaming drum set. The burning car is a recurring theme throughout this story, always showing up during moments of personal power or rebellion. The frozen land and snow is also a recurring theme (and this era went unnecessarily hard looking back at it).________________________________________________ The Hiatus (2017-2018)On July 6th, 2017, twenty one pilots began a year long hiatus with a series of cryptic tweets showing a red eye slowly closing.(left to right) YOULL HAVE TO COME AND FIND ME MY PRETTY SLEEPER WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT IF WE COULD JUST LAY DOWN? I WILL FEAR THE NIGHT AGAIN NOBODY DREAMS WHEN THEY BLINK REMEMBER THE MORNING IS WHEN NIGHT IS DEAD AND NOW I JUST SIT IN SILENCE After almost a year of silence, the gif on top of the Vessel store page updated to show a glitched-out url which brought you to a site called http://dmaorg.info/found/15398642_14/clancy.html.This is where the band would slowly build their new world and tease their new records. They continue to utilize this site for updates to this day. On 7/2/18, members of their mailing list received an email titled “ARE YOU STILL SLEEPING?” with a gif of a yellow vulture’s eye with clips of Jumpsuit playing in the pupil. The eye officially opened on 7/10/18 with the release of “Jumpsuit” and “Nico and the Niners”, revealing the new logo -// https://preview.redd.it/zvhp7xaoiaxc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c7299d4493cefcb7b3f531c2d9fb088f494c957 ________________________________________________ DMAORG (in a nutshell)dmaorg.info is a website domain officially created and hosted by the band Twenty One Pilots and used mainly as an online conceptual teaser for their 2018 album "TRENCH". It featured a cryptic background story and important lore information referenced in the songs and music videos of the TRENCH era.The domain was first discovered by the fanbase on 4/21/2018, during the band’s hiatus between Blurryface and Trench through a link hidden inside the Twenty One Pilots’ official merch store website. The original link led to an exclusive 404 error page, telling the viewer “they’re in violation” and “no one should know about this” while showing a violation code https://preview.redd.it/rovuirppiaxc1.png?width=1774&format=png&auto=webp&s=d55c5fc13d967bb5d776bbe15bc32f0c8a8319e9 404 ER_RORhidden message: EASTISUP When pasted correctly into the URL of the website, the violation code granted access to another page of dmaorg.info containing journals and images telling the story of Clancy, a disillusioned fictional character living inside a circular theocratic city loomed by huge walls and ruled by nine bishops – the Sacred Municipality of Dema. It sat nestled in the lower region of the large and wild continent of Trench. brief scroll-through of early dmaorg.info The religion the city follows is called Vialism, where the end goal is to take your own life as it is the only route to Paradise, and that the bland dystopia they are living in should be embraced. The Bishops' names were a combination of lyrics from different songs on "Blurryface". The Bishops were as follows: Andre, Lisden, Keons, Nico, Reisdro, Sacarver, Nills, Vetomo, ListoClancy started to question Dema and Vialism 9 years after arriving. His dismay grew as his struggles with Dema became visible and the call for “more” became stronger, and he formulated a plan to escape, attempting multiple times before Nico (calls himself Blurryface), the head bishop, finds him and brings him back. He convinced Nico one day to leave the city, and destroyed the car they were driving (events of heavydirtysoul). He succeeds in escaping Nico yet again, but after getting lost in the unknown wilderness of Trench, he grew weary and anxious. Nico found him yet again in a narrow valley 5 days later. This time was different however, as he stumbled across a group of people on the clifftops of Trench. The Banditos, the rebel group he only ever heard rumors of (the events of "Jumpsuit"). After being returned to Dema, the Banditos returned for Clancy and got him out during the Annual Assemblage of the Glorified, which is a disturbing annual ritual that only the most upstanding citizens of Dema called “The Glorified” may attend, where they become the ”Glorious Gone” (they die) and become available vessels for the Bishops to use( events of "Nico and the Niners"). They brought him back to their camp and taught him their ways, but the cycle was just too strong and he was taken back (events of Levitate). We didn't hear from Clancy again until the release of the "Chlorine" music video, where we were introduced to Ned. In this letter, he talked about his time outside in Trench and noted that he felt torn between the two places, but interestingly enough he called Dema home- something he never thought he could be able to do again. On 4/2/2021, the website updated to show a progress bar that would result in the site being terminated, and a complete inversion of colors. On 4/5/2021, all files in the subdomain were deleted and the website showed up an “Account Terminated” message instead, showing that the Bishops had found and overtaken the site, while also hiding some images teasing the next era of the band's projects. https://preview.redd.it/urpq2i7uiaxc1.png?width=695&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf3aec021a11b3e320417375ab0e5fdc1e8dbad5 Account Terminatedhidden message: C.L.A.N.C.Y I.S D.E.A.D After almost a year of silence, on 3/16/2022 the site updated with a new map of the continent of Trench which introduced the island of Voldsøy-the Norwegian word for “Violence Island.” Map of the Continent of Trench. Notable locations include the main continent, the City of Dema, Port Vial, and the island Voldsøy With this map, we saw the return of Clancy and the Torchbearer after they washed up on the island following the events of the Saturday music video. Clancy talked about how he was being used as propaganda, the performance he was to give on the ship for another Annual Assemblage of the Glorified, and how they were attacked by a strange creature under the water. He notes that the Bishops on the ship weren't real. Throughout a couple of days, Clancy lamented about his struggles back in captivity in the city and formulated his plan to take down the bishops, eventually finding a way to succeed. On 3/17/22, a schematic was uploaded showing steps to some type of ritual labeled as “psychokinesis”, and that they must “seize the available vessel”. On the next line it states that the available vessel is something that could be considered a “Glorious Gone”, so in essence its a dead body. On March 18th, 2022, Clancy discovered how to perform psychokinesis using a weapon fashioned by some curious little creatures on Voldsøy, affectionately identified as "Ned" (Neuro Expansion Device). They were thought to have been extinct. We see Ned in the Chlorine music video, and hanging out by the fire in “Ned’s cozy fireplace” These little creatures have special antlers that the bishops use for seizing their deceased victims, allowing them to inhabit their body and take control of them until they inevitably start to decay. However, they seem to be working with Keons who betrayed Nico. We saw these events play out in "The Outside" music video, which is explained further down in the thread. Fun fact-the neds call each other ned and write letters to each other :D letter to ned from ned, with a drawing of the \"Trees\" tree visual "ned,On 2/13/2024, 1500 scary red letters were sent out to the public by the Sacred Municipality of Dema containing evidence seemingly seized from Clancy's belongings. It included a new letter from Clancy, where he talked about having renewed hope in his plan, an updated map showing the new Paladin Strait between Voldsøy and the mainland of Trench, and a request for information on Clancy's whereabouts from the Bishops of Dema. Both letters included hidden messages, but handwritten was a question. How did you find http://dmaorg.info/found/15398642_14/clancy.html?________________________________________________ Chlorine Music VideoWatch "Chlorine" hereOn 1/22/2019, the "Chlorine" music video was uploaded to youtube. In this music video, we saw an entirely alternate reality than the one we were accustomed to. Tyler and Josh were just some pool-cleaning guys who stumbled across a little funky shy guy in Australia (its Ned). Nothing out of the ordinary there. Over the course of the video, Ned started to come out of his shell as he became very interested in what the boys were pouring into the pool (it was chlorine). Tyler had a cup the whole time, but he merely pondered it instead of taking a sip. During the bridge, when the pool is filled, Ned took a dip and grew a full set of antlers. He sat down with Tyler at the end of the video, where Tyler offered him a sip of his drink and he politely declined while looking mildly disgusted. This video didn’t seem like it had too much lore significance at first. However, its repeated symbolism throughout the story and the return of Ned, the introduction of him coinciding with a letter that seems to directly contradict what we saw in natn/levitate music videos, and his significance later on, it feels too important to not include his origin… ________________________________________________ The HypeWatch "The Hype" hereon 7/26/2019, "The Hype" music video was uploaded after recruiting a bunch of fans to partake. We're invited into Tyler's chest where there's a sick house concert happening, and everything is plaid. Everyone is wearing plaid. As the video progresses, everyone starts wearing more plaid. Even the house is wearing plaid. The camera pans out to the crowd and its just a bunch of people wearing plaid but Ned is there too (he is wearing plaid but he doesn't have antlers). The plaid levels increased to critical amounts, and the house simply could not contain it and it exploded. Tyler and Josh fell back through the roof, and continued their performance layered in flannel as the house rebuilt itself around them. As they slowly took off their tartan shackles, they placed yellow tape over the broken pieces. ________________________________________________ Level of Concern ARGThe level of concern ARG was a long, arduous, and extremely complicated online scavenger hunt that was put on by the band in July of 2020. It was designed to last over a week, but we figured it out in 12 hours. It started with a cryptic livestream on youtube that just showed a room of analog tvs that would play a distorted clip of Level of Concern on repeat, occasionally interjected by jarring audio bits. On the tv screens, various gifs and images would cycle through and occasionally a complex code would show up on screen, leading to various webpages and puzzles. There were a total of 20 codes that needed to be entered on usb.twentyonepilots.com. Once code 20 was entered, the first 500 people needed to enter their address, and they received a USB drive in the mail. This usb contained various cryptic files, demos, and goofy images from early in the Vessel era, including a video from Tyler thanking the fans for playing the game and figuring out the codes. Behind him, an analog tv flashes the phrase “Clancy is dead” in code, as can be seen hereClancy Is Dead (FULL WITH AUDIO) You can watch the recap of how the codes were found for yourself here. ________________________________________________ Christmas Saves the YearWatch "Christmas Saves the Year" hereOn the cover of "Christmas saves the Year", there is a tiny present behind Josh that has the nametag "Clancy" and it says "Sai is Propaganda" alluding to their upcoming album "Scaled and Icy" ________________________________________________ The Live Experience Control RoomAfter dmaorg.info was terminated, the site was hiding a few images teasing the new era.70's style Scaled and Icy promo posters After the release of “Shy Away”, live.twentyonepilots.com was made available to the public, and we were introduced to our icy yellow-eyed friend, Trash the Dragon. The site led to a control room where you could explore dozens of easter eggs, purchase merchandise, and wait for incoming song premieres leading up to the release of their 6th album “Scaled and Icy” - which happens to be an anagram for “clancy is dead”. It was also here that Dema held their first ever live performance, an event designed to entertain(indoctrinate) the citizens of Dema, and Clancy was the star. However, he was repeatedly referred to as Tyler during the show. ________________________________________________ Choker Music VideoWatch "Choker" hereThe Choker music video was a very interesting, seemingly light hearted and silly addition to this saga. It started off in a similar manner to the “Chlorine” music video (which is explained further down). This time, it’s set in a normal area of Columbus, Ohio, and filled with various alleyways (which we could later explore in the Roblox live event…i wont get into that here). Tyler, wearing an orange beanie, walked nervously into a toy store and was met with its employees Josh and Jim (josh’s dog). He got to the counter, and really wanted the blue dragon in the case, but Josh just started drumming. Tyler tried to get his attention, but Josh was locked in and slamming away. Tyler, now frustrated, turned back and explored the shop a little more and was startled by a sudden blue flash. Something to note, when he turned around the first time, Josh was in the same position he was in when Tyler walked in and the drums were nowhere to be found. He turned back around and went back to the counter, and Jim had turned into a little toy with a blue bandana. Josh tenderly picked up the little dragon from before and set it on the counter in front of Tyler. He heavily pondered it for a moment, before deciding to yoink it right in front of Josh and dip. Tyler didn’t realize shoplifting was against the rules. Josh chased him down with a massive gun. He caught up with Tyler and shot a giant net at him, knocking him over and encapsulating him, and Josh dragged him back to the shop. Once they reached the front, Josh opened his mouth and just absolutely smited Tyler, turning him into a bobblehead on the shelf next to Jim and the nearly liberated Trash toy. ________________________________________________ The Livestream ExperienceThe show started off as a 70’s style morning show called “Good Day Dema” with its eccentric hosts Dan Lisden and Sally Sacarver. It opened with Tyler (Clancy) sitting on the couch in between the two bishops looking positively miserable, and the bishops scornfully mocking him and insulting Josh.Dan Lisden (left), Tyler (middle), Sally Sacarver (right) Then they transitioned into Choker, a single from Scaled and Icy. The show was a concert filled with various mashups and interesting cutoffs, always being stopped or changed during a song or lyrics about rebellion or personal power. Occasionally, the bishop hosts would come back in little infomercial segments to promote Scaled and Icy, though curiously looking more and more beat up and…for lack of better phrasing they were decaying. The bishops had seized these two people and were living vicariously through their bodies while they slowly rotted during the performance to give off the impression of manufactured joy. Dan Lisden with blooddrippuing down his shirt during the 2nd informercial break, then actively decaying during the last break Sally Sacarver looking a little worse for wear (no pun intended)-second infomercial break, then actively cementing herself into my nightmares- Last infomercial break In the middle of the performance, just before “Lane Boy”, the bishops came on screen with half of their faces painted black reciting the “Stay Low” poem. The last verse of “Redecorate” was put into the end of “Lane Boy”, and was cut off by “Chlorine”. After a solemn moment during Heathens/Trees, Josh returned as the Torchbearer and they performed some songs off of Trench, burning car on stage included. After this segment concluded with heavydirtysoul, the bishops came back for their final infomercial dripping blood and threatening the audience, and then played it off like nothing happened. The performance carried on, eventually getting to Car Radio where alarms started to blare, and chaos erupted in the studio. “Never Take It” was last on the setlist, performed in a street filled with burning cars and running people. After the song ended, Tyler slowly and begrudgingly trudged back to the first set with the bishops-who were somehow looking completely normal, and finished the end of Choker, and then everyone stood up and clapped. ________________________________________________ Saturday Music VideoWatch "Saturday" hereOn 7/8/21, the next Annual Assemblage of the Glorified was set to take place. Because of the smashing success of the livestream, the bishops decided to hold a party on a submarine and have Clancy and Josh be the main performers. They sent bishop imposters (bishposters?) to control the ship and make sure everything was going smoothly. Everything did not go smoothly. A massive dragon (trash) attacked the ship, nearly drowning everyone, but 21 people are shown to have survived overall (the other 19 pilots?) _________________________________________________ The Outside Music Video/WeaponWatch "The Outside" hereOn 3/18/22, the Outside music video was uploaded after a few days of updates on dmaorg. It began with a visual of Trash, the 9 bishops, and Keons in the center holding a pair of antlers, having been caught controlling Trash and betraying the other Bishops. Then they just start stabbing. Julius Caesar style. not a fun way to go, i won’t lie. The yellow glow in Keons’ eyes dimmed, and so too did the life in Trash as he sank to the ocean floor. Clancy (Tyler??) washed up on the frozen island of Voldsøy, covered in snow. Josh/The Torchbearer came up and picked Clancy up by his collar and they walked off, eventually finding a break in the foliage. They discovered a cliff face with a cave opening, and a little guy welcoming them in. it’s Ned!! They walked through the narrow cave passages, spitting some fire bars on the way, eventually arriving at a rotation you couldn’t have dreamed up better. A bunch of Neds, all hanging out by the fire. The Ned that welcomed them in started to leave through a side cave, but Clancy and the Torchbearer followed. They met Ned on the beach, who broke his antlers to give to Clancy. He posted a schematic for a ritual to harness the power of psychokinesis. w-eap-ø-n The bottom reads: seize available vessel at Voldsoy eastern cove intercept bishops. _____________________________ glorious gone = available vessel ________________________________ bishops control the available vessel! intercept and seize _________________________________ they will make you a weapon _________________________________The top letters unscramble to say “seize keons” The Neds began performing the motions, and Clancy followed- somehow taking control of Keons’ body. He was an available vessel after all! After emoting in front of the bishops, he destroyed one of the towering lights in front of him. Keons’ body fell to the ground, and Clancy regained control of his own body. He later wrote about the experience in the most recent letter update on dmaorg. After Clancy regained control of his body, he’s seen with the Torchbearer waiting for a signal. On the other side of the Strait, dozens of banditos return the signal, cutting to a blue flaming city behind them On 3/18/2022 Clancy uploaded the most recent **digital*\* letter to the site What is this thing? This device? This gift? Some sort of neurological connection or expansion. Psychokinetic weapon? This is absurd. Why was this given to me? Why am I the only one that can wield it? Was this the reason that I survived? My mind is racing as I wait here on the rocks -- staring off into the darkness. Waiting for our torches to be mirrored - the signal he told me to wait for. It feels oddly familiar. Not the spikes in my hand, but the power it harnesses, I've felt it before. Is this also the source of those rumors I heard in the dark corners of the city? Legends and stories that I assumed were myth, inspired by children's nightmares -- tales of what the bishops would use the bodies for. Those "honorable" citizens who acheived The Glorious Gone -- referred to as available vessels. It all begins to make sense. The episodes I would have: the blood red vision, my dreams of flying, the out of body account of the rider in the river, the decaying hosts of the television show, the robed figures that commanded the doomed ship... Had we all been "seized" by the bishops using this same technique? Is this where their power comes from? Are they immortal, or just feeding off the next body, giving their hosts a brief second-life? I am in my original life, why am I available to this control? This whole time I thought I was battling my inner self. Was I actually under assault for something else? someONE else? This small eerie island has made me a weapon. We both believe that we can use it to change the momentum of this war. Now, we must return to the mainland where they should be there to recieve is. We will destroy and rebuild. Though it's been years since he last spoke with them, I hope they have not lost faith in The Torchbearers plan. But how could any of this have been planned? -Clancy________________________________________________ Clancy Era-Where we are nowOn 2/13/2024, 1500 scary red letters were sent out to the public by the Sacred Municipality of Dema containing evidence seemingly seized from Clancy's belongings. It included a new letter from Clancy, where he talked about having renewed hope in his plan, an updated map showing the new Paladin Strait between Voldsøy and the mainland of Trench, and a request for information on Clancy's whereabouts from the Bishops of Dema. Both letters included hidden messages, but handwritten was a question.How did you find http://dmaorg.info/found/15398642_14/clancy.html?Information requests from the Bishops of Dema along with a new transcribed letter from Clancy, coupled with an updated map of Trench to include the new \"Paladin Strait\" Letter One Transcript: YOU HAVE RECENTLY ACCESSED INTERNAL DOCUMENTS PERTAINING TO CASE 15390642 14: (DELINQUENT] CLANCY VS. THE SACRED MUNICIPALITY OF DEMA IN THIS ONGOING INVESTIGATION, WE ARE URGING ANYONE WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE WHEREABOUTS OF THE ACCUSED TO COME FORWARD WITH RELEVANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE CASE. IT IS REQUIRED THAT ALL INHABITANTS OF DEMA TO DO THEIR DUTY IN BRINGING ALL ENEMIES OF VIALISM AND ITS TEACHINGS TO SWIFT JUSTICE -THE HONORABLE BISHOPS OF THE SACRED MUNICIPALITY OF DEMA. *take excessive measures in attempting to correct or make amends for an error, weakness, or problem. (the oxford dictionary definiton of overcompensate)________________________________________________ Letter Two Transcript: THIS DOCUMENT IS DESIGNATED AS EVIDENCE UNDER PERUSAL AND INVESTIGATION BY THE SACRED MUNICIPALITY OF DEMA AND DEMA ORGANIZATION. THIS DOCUMENT IS INTENDED FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE DISCLOSED OUTSIDE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL WITHOUT PRIOR APPROVAL FROM THE AUTHORIZED BISHOP OF ITS DESIGNATED DISTRICT OR THE PRESIDING LEGAL AUTHORITY. THE INTEGRITY OF THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE MAINTAINED AT ALL TIMES TO ENSURE ITS ADMISSIBILITY THROUGHOUT THE INVESTIGATIONhidden message: STILL ALIVE ________________________________________________ Clancy's Letter Transcript: 024 02MOON09 "I'm not as scared as I used to be. Their mystery begins to fade as a method to defeat them becomes more clear\**. I no longer feel powerless. I can outsmart them. This new power of psychokinesis worked, and I believe it can work again. I stand here, looking down at the line where the water meets the sand-a starting line. All the while, knowing there is a finish line across the Strait. Their compass lies, but mine remains true. I've left embers of inspiration, I only hope whatever spark was left has grown to a torch, and together we create** an inferno. -Clancyhidden message-meruioenpepa ________________________________________________ I Am ClancyWatch "I am Clancy" hereOn 2/22/24, a new spoken letter was uploaded to the youtube from Clancy, basically narrating what you just read. In a portion of the video where it shows the map of Dema, Keons' tower is grayed out. He explained his story, what happened to the Bishops, and how he's an exception to the strange powers the Bishops wield. He's taking back his own identity, and he is going to return to Trench to finish what he's started. ________________________________________________ Red TapeOn 2/17/2024, the band updated their studio album covers to include red tape. The best running theory is that the red tape signifies bishop control. That's why keon's circle is taped, why trash is taped, why clifford is taped specifically to cover leave the city. the city is still under bishop control, and the vultures are property of Dema for surveillance. since the grandfathers are taped, and trench is in the shape of a brain, i can only assume that insinuates that the bishops have control over the continent somehow since many ideas from vessel are used in this story. or, to go along with my other theory in the next part, clancy is so focused on getting back to trench that its clouding his visionthe red tape seems to only be partially (but still almost fully) covering the eyes of the subjects on the cover ________________________________________________ Important details that couldn't really fit anywhere
If i have missed anything you feel is deeply important to understanding the basics of the lore, please let me know!! I’m going to be updating this thread as things come in. In the meantime, i hope this answers your basic questions and happy theorizing! |
2024.04.28 23:49 apadayaclub PROM Token Analysis: Powering the Prom zkEVM Ecosystem
$PROM is the native token that fuels the Prom zkEVM ecosystem, a Layer 2 scaling solution for blockchain transactions. It serves multiple purposes within the platform:
Transaction Fees: Every transaction on the Prom zkEVM requires PROM for gas, facilitating smooth operation.
Governance: PROM holders have voting rights on proposals shaping the future of the Prom ecosystem, promoting decentralization.
Incentivization: PROM can be used to reward users for contributing to the network, such as providing liquidity or reporting security vulnerabilities.
Strengths:
Versatility: PROM's utility across transactions, governance, and incentives creates a strong foundation for the Prom ecosystem.
Scalability: By leveraging zkEVM technology, PROM facilitates faster and cheaper transactions compared to the base layer blockchain.
Interoperability: Prom zkEVM boasts interoperability with various blockchain networks, including EVM-compatible and non-EVM chains, promoting wider adoption.
Active Development: The Prom team's continuous integration with new partners like RWA_Inc_ and Middle, signifies a commitment to growth and innovation.
Weaknesses:
Early Stage: Prom is a relatively new project, and its long-term viability depends on wider ecosystem adoption and successful zkEVM implementation.
Competition: The zkEVM space is crowded with competing solutions, and PROM needs to carve out a distinct niche to gain traction.
Token Dependence: The overall success of PROM is tied to the success of the Prom zkEVM platform.
Future Outlook:
PROM's future hinges on the development and adoption of the Prom zkEVM. If the platform delivers on its promises of scalability, security, and interoperability, PROM has the potential to become a valuable asset within the DeFi landscape.
Here are some additional points to consider:
The upcoming Prom event at token2049 week in Dubai suggests a focus on community building and marketing, which could be crucial for user acquisition.
The success of asset tokenization on Prom zkEVM could significantly expand its use cases and value proposition.
Overall, PROM offers a compelling set of features within a promising zkEVM ecosystem. However, its long-term success relies on overcoming competition and establishing itself as a leading Layer 2 solution.
submitted by apadayaclub to u/apadayaclub [link] [comments]
Transaction Fees: Every transaction on the Prom zkEVM requires PROM for gas, facilitating smooth operation.
Governance: PROM holders have voting rights on proposals shaping the future of the Prom ecosystem, promoting decentralization.
Incentivization: PROM can be used to reward users for contributing to the network, such as providing liquidity or reporting security vulnerabilities.
Strengths:
Versatility: PROM's utility across transactions, governance, and incentives creates a strong foundation for the Prom ecosystem.
Scalability: By leveraging zkEVM technology, PROM facilitates faster and cheaper transactions compared to the base layer blockchain.
Interoperability: Prom zkEVM boasts interoperability with various blockchain networks, including EVM-compatible and non-EVM chains, promoting wider adoption.
Active Development: The Prom team's continuous integration with new partners like RWA_Inc_ and Middle, signifies a commitment to growth and innovation.
Weaknesses:
Early Stage: Prom is a relatively new project, and its long-term viability depends on wider ecosystem adoption and successful zkEVM implementation.
Competition: The zkEVM space is crowded with competing solutions, and PROM needs to carve out a distinct niche to gain traction.
Token Dependence: The overall success of PROM is tied to the success of the Prom zkEVM platform.
Future Outlook:
PROM's future hinges on the development and adoption of the Prom zkEVM. If the platform delivers on its promises of scalability, security, and interoperability, PROM has the potential to become a valuable asset within the DeFi landscape.
Here are some additional points to consider:
The upcoming Prom event at token2049 week in Dubai suggests a focus on community building and marketing, which could be crucial for user acquisition.
The success of asset tokenization on Prom zkEVM could significantly expand its use cases and value proposition.
Overall, PROM offers a compelling set of features within a promising zkEVM ecosystem. However, its long-term success relies on overcoming competition and establishing itself as a leading Layer 2 solution.
promvalidators
2024.04.28 23:43 Lazy_Armadillo_4530 overwhelmed
hey guys! when i say i am new, i mean i am NEW. i have not ridden an actual bike in over a year, i occasionally ride a stationary bike, and i am decent shape and moderately active. i am a 19 year old girl and watched IU's little 500 race and was really interested. where would i start if i wanted to eventually race, how long should i train before i try racing, i am completely lost. i also 5 feet tall and like 115 lbs so i feel like it might be harder for me to get good at it but i have no idea. any tips? is it too late for me? what do i do, where do i go, i am just so lost. thanks!
submitted by Lazy_Armadillo_4530 to cycling [link] [comments]
2024.04.28 23:42 ThrowRA35298239 I (M/31) just ended a 5 year relationship with GF (F/29). How to resist urge to get back together?
Today I broke up with my GF and it was the hardest thing ever.
I've been the dumpee plenty of times, but never the dumper. This was 1000x worse. How do I resist the urge to say nvm, I wasn't thinking right and take her back?
She was very abusive in the beginning & middle of the relationship, and at the end I just kind of tapped out. Things were finally improving in some areas (and getting worse in others) but there was actual hope. The problem was my attraction to her is gone by now. When having the break up convo, she brought up ways we can fix things and it sounded AMAZING. The problem is, I can't trust her.
She would not be a good mom. She struggles with many mental health issues and couldn't handle adopting a dog for 2 days and had to return him. She struggles to hold down a job/apt. It's just... she's not reliable. However, the flip side of me says hey, I could see her as a stay at home mom. I make enough money and she might strive better there. Maybe if that was her sole focus she'd be good at it.
She eats cause of her depression and it caused significant weight gain. She never showed interest in coming to the gym or any group activity style workouts to get us both back in shape, but during the break up convo she brought up she'd love to go with me now. We've been in a dead bedroom for 2 years, hooked up about 4 times in those years and all of them were a "fine lets get this over with" type deal. Her anti depressant and birth control killed her libido, and eventually I just gave up after feeling constantly rejected, and fear of getting her pregnant and being stuck with her then. But, during the break up talk, she said she'd be open to more cuddling again and sex.
Idk if it's just empty promises or if I'm too quick to quit. She's not a good communicator but I clicked with her in a way like I haven't with anyone else, between shared interests, passions, etc. She makes the BEST best friend, but not a good girlfriend, but the POTENTIAL for her to be a good girlfriend is huge.
My gut instinct tells me to stick to my guns but god damn, I'm still madly in love with her and only broke up because my long term goals didn't seem compatible with her but maybe there's a good chance she'll change? Maybe she'll pick up a hobby or something to make her less mopey 24/7. Maybe if she moved back in with me, she'd contribute this time around. My thoughts are all over the place. A break up is such a final, that's that type thing. Do breaks even work? What would you guys define as a break? Maybe that's what I need to do?
Especially on a weekend this sucks. Every weekend we would spend together. Right now she'd be sitting on the couch with me and we'd either be watching one of our shows, or doing our own things while just hanging out. It was so comforting. I loved those tiny moments. It's so hard to not pick up the phone and just say come over and pretend everything else is okay.
And the guilt. Jesus, as if I wasn't heart broken enough crying my eyes out and trying to hide it as I left her place, seeing her breakdown when I was always the one taking care of her, now being the cause of her falling apart. I feel like a fucking monster.
submitted by ThrowRA35298239 to relationship_advice [link] [comments]
I've been the dumpee plenty of times, but never the dumper. This was 1000x worse. How do I resist the urge to say nvm, I wasn't thinking right and take her back?
She was very abusive in the beginning & middle of the relationship, and at the end I just kind of tapped out. Things were finally improving in some areas (and getting worse in others) but there was actual hope. The problem was my attraction to her is gone by now. When having the break up convo, she brought up ways we can fix things and it sounded AMAZING. The problem is, I can't trust her.
She would not be a good mom. She struggles with many mental health issues and couldn't handle adopting a dog for 2 days and had to return him. She struggles to hold down a job/apt. It's just... she's not reliable. However, the flip side of me says hey, I could see her as a stay at home mom. I make enough money and she might strive better there. Maybe if that was her sole focus she'd be good at it.
She eats cause of her depression and it caused significant weight gain. She never showed interest in coming to the gym or any group activity style workouts to get us both back in shape, but during the break up convo she brought up she'd love to go with me now. We've been in a dead bedroom for 2 years, hooked up about 4 times in those years and all of them were a "fine lets get this over with" type deal. Her anti depressant and birth control killed her libido, and eventually I just gave up after feeling constantly rejected, and fear of getting her pregnant and being stuck with her then. But, during the break up talk, she said she'd be open to more cuddling again and sex.
Idk if it's just empty promises or if I'm too quick to quit. She's not a good communicator but I clicked with her in a way like I haven't with anyone else, between shared interests, passions, etc. She makes the BEST best friend, but not a good girlfriend, but the POTENTIAL for her to be a good girlfriend is huge.
My gut instinct tells me to stick to my guns but god damn, I'm still madly in love with her and only broke up because my long term goals didn't seem compatible with her but maybe there's a good chance she'll change? Maybe she'll pick up a hobby or something to make her less mopey 24/7. Maybe if she moved back in with me, she'd contribute this time around. My thoughts are all over the place. A break up is such a final, that's that type thing. Do breaks even work? What would you guys define as a break? Maybe that's what I need to do?
Especially on a weekend this sucks. Every weekend we would spend together. Right now she'd be sitting on the couch with me and we'd either be watching one of our shows, or doing our own things while just hanging out. It was so comforting. I loved those tiny moments. It's so hard to not pick up the phone and just say come over and pretend everything else is okay.
And the guilt. Jesus, as if I wasn't heart broken enough crying my eyes out and trying to hide it as I left her place, seeing her breakdown when I was always the one taking care of her, now being the cause of her falling apart. I feel like a fucking monster.
2024.04.28 23:29 Omologist Tasty and Easy Biscuit Beef Empanadas
 | Tasty and Easy Biscuit Beef Empanadas Biscuit Beef Empanadas are a soft, pillow-like version of regular empanadas. Using buttermilk milk biscuits as the base, instead of a crunchy pie crust or pastry wrappers, creates these mouthwatering appetizers or small bites. For a healthier recipe, switch out the ground beef for ground turkey. This recipe is a perfect party platter or appetizer because they are bite size, finger food that will have you coming back for more! Since these are home-made empanadas, you will have to get your hands dirty, flattening the dough and creating little oval shapes. Also, a great activity to do with kids. Each […] See the first comment for a link to the recipe submitted by Omologist to mincerecipes [link] [comments] |
2024.04.28 23:20 Born-Beach The One Beneath - Part 2 [Final]
Part One.
My jaw clenches. It’s my turn to go pale with shock. Suddenly, the puzzle pieces begin to connect in my mind. They’re building a picture that I’m not sure I want to see, but it’s a picture that’s becoming difficult to deny. “Why?” I press. “What makes you so sure they weren’t just test subjects like the others?”
“These felt different,” Maria says quickly. “Horrible in a way that even the others couldn’t compare to. It’s like when you look at a manikin, or a doll… What’s the phrase?”
“Uncanny valley,” I offer.
“That’s it,” she says. “That’s what I felt looking at these things, the uncanny valley. It was like they didn’t have a soul– like they never had a soul. Some looked human. Nearly. But they were too tall, or their limbs were too long, or they had too many teeth in all the wrong places. But what scared me most of all wasn’t the bodies, it was the thought that something had killed those things. Something had torn literal nightmares to pieces, and there was a good chance it was coming to do the same thing to me and John.
“John,” I say, still trying to parse his significance in her ordeal. “That many bodies couldn’t have appeared overnight. They’d been there for a long time. That means he probably knew about them, didn’t he?”
She nods, gasping. “He knew. He fucking knew. He shoved me onto that pile of corpses, that festering and decaying pit of monsters and told me as much. He started shouting. Call me a monster all over again. Evil, he said. Twisted. He kept pointing at me like all of this was my fault, and he hadn’t both led us to our deaths.”
Her voice becomes a stuttering mess. “A-all the while I heard that thing in the dark. Approaching. I felt terrified, hopeless and numb. I kept asking John why me? Why go through all this trouble just to kill me? And he told me that he didn’t have a choice. He knelt next to me, put a hand on my cheek and whispered that his child needed to feed. It was getting hungry. Desperate. He almost looked fucking r-remorseful if you can believe it, and he told me that he was really sorry, and that he hated to do this but… He stepped away from me. Stood against the wall of the chamber. Watched. Waited.”
For a second, I’m afraid Maria is going to break into fresh sobs, but she pushes through.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she continues, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I didn’t have anywhere to run, anywhere to hide, so I just lay there in that heap of monsters. I gave up. The whole time, those footsteps got closer and closer. The nearer they came, the slower they got. It was like it knew I was trapped. Like it’d done this before, and knew there wasn’t a rush…” She looks up at me. “Do you think… John did that to other people too?”
“It’s certainly possible. Did you get a good look at the creature?”
She shudders. “Yes. I had my headlamp trained on the passage the whole time, and when it appeared around the corner, I almost missed it. I heard it, but I could barely see it. It was a tall, flickering shadow. It pulsed. Vibrated. The way it moved was jerky, haphazard, almost like it had one foot in our reality, like it was glitching with every step it took.”
“Glitching…” I mutter. Why does that sound familiar?
“That’s right,” she says. “And that wasn’t even the strangest thing about it.” She gets small in her chair. “It had these eyes. Amber ones. Bright and gleaming, like twin cinders smoldering in empty space. It felt like they were piercing me, like its eyes were digging through my skin and looking into my mind. Or my soul. It was like that thing was taking bites out of my memories, tasting them before spitting back out…”
“How did it feel? Painful?”
“No, she says. “It felt cold. Like a blizzard in my head, like all my thoughts had frozen to a crawl. Maybe that’s why I calmed down. I don’t know… I remember sitting there, totally numb as the Shadow phased through the metal bars of the gate. It almost looked human. It had two arms, two legs and a head, but its body was made of black static. Like television interference.”
Television interference… Where have I heard that description before? I rack my mind for a match, some kind of urban legend or ancient lore that matches what she’s saying, but nothing jumps out. I flip through the pages of my clipboard, stopping on one labeled ABERRATE EVENTS. It’s The Facility’s own Most Wanted List. My eyes fly through the cases listed, but there isn’t anything close to what she’s describing.
An idea strikes me.
“Did the Shadow hurt you at all?”
She looks down at her arm. There’s a large gash there, framed by clots of dried blood. “No… I don’t think so,” she says hesitantly. “I got these injuries when I was trying to escape.”
No, of course it didn’t. It had other food available already. “And what happened after it pierced you with its eyes?” I ask.
“It walked past me,” she says. “It walked through that mulch of corpses and headed straight for John. It started speaking along the way. At least, I think it did.”
“What do you mean by speaking?”
“Do you remember how I said it was howling before?”
“I do.”
“Well, this time it was hissing– like a livewire, or static electricity. Whatever it was communicating, John looked panicked. He was crying. Pleading with it. He kept saying that he’d done his best, but there was nothing else out there, so the Shadow would have to make due with me. But the Shadow didn’t seem to care. It grabbed John by his long hair, lifted him up to the ceiling and its cinderlight eyes started gleaming an angry orange.”
My heartbeat races. My pen flies across the clipboard, desperately trying to avoid missing a single detail.
Maria keeps talking. She keeps giving me more of what I need. “John kicked and screamed,” she says. “He begged me to help him, told me that if I didn’t I was every bit the monster he’d said I was and I’d be next… But before he could finish, the Shadow’s eyes flashed and leaked fire. John started shrieking, moaning as his face melted into his skull.”
Maria’s face twists with revulsion. Disgust. She looks away, back to the bunker. I wonder if she’s hearing what I am– that dim rumble of something moving underground, that slow march of an approaching nightmare. Our clock is ticking. It’s not something I can tell her though, because as soon as she starts panicking, I lose the chance to connect the dots I need.
“Maria,” I say, pulling her attention back. “Continue. It’s critical I get these details.”
“Sorry… It’s not a memory I like thinking of but… The Shadow held John there, his legs twitching weakly, and then it grabbed his head and tore it off his neck.” She brings a hand to her mouth, starts nervously biting her nails. “Then it lifted John’s skull to its amber eyes. It opened its mouth and screamed fire. The heat I felt was like an open furnace, like Hell itself. Tendrils of darkness emerged from the Shadow, clutching at John’s scorched skull and cracking it open like an egg.
"His brain spilled out. The Shadow caught it in those tendrils, and brought it into itself. His brain. Like it was fucking assimilating it… Or eating it. ” She looks up at me, and there’s the same angry defiance I saw when we met. “Now do you get it?” she asks. “Now do you see what I mean about this thing being the devil? What else could do something like that?”
A good question. I can think of one entity. Only one. If my guess is correct, then Maria and I get to live to see tomorrow’s sunrise. If it’s wrong, then I need to put a bullet in both our heads before that thing finds us.
All of it hinges on my next question.
“It killed John, then what? What did the Shadow do?”
“It turned back to me,” she says. “It glared at me with those blazing eyes, and I thought I was next. I knew I was. But then I felt another blizzard sweep across my mind, and that was it– I blacked out.”
“Hang on…” I mutter. “What do you mean you blacked out? I found you lying outside of the bunker. How did you escape?”
She shakes her head, frantic. “I don’t have a clue. I blacked out, then the next thing I remember was waking up outside the bunker, with you pouring water on my face and telling me we needed to talk. That’s it.”
She shoots up from her chair. “Christ! We need to leave.”
I blink. “Why?”
“The police. I’ve gotta tell them about John and what he was doing. I’ve gotta tell them about this base. Maybe John brought others here. More victims. Maybe some of them are still alive down there and need help. We need search parties and–”
“Don’t bother,” I say.
She looks at me, stunned.
“The police won’t have any record of John. Tell them where you were, what you saw in that bunker, and they’ll probably kill you.” I reach into my pocket, pull out my lighter and run a thumb down the sparkwheel. It flickers to life. “Fact is, John doesn’t exist. Neither does this base.”
I bring the lighter to the edge of my clipboard. The flame catches a page.
“What the hell are you doing?” Maria exclaims.
“Saving your life,” I say, tossing the clipboard to the floor. It pops and cracks as the fire eats the woman’s story, one word at a time.
“What the fuck? You said you believed me!”
“I still do,” I tell her. “That’s the problem. An hour ago, I had no idea what was going on here, but the more you spoke, the more it started making sense. I realized that you and John were more right than wrong. That there really is a conspiracy here. A cover-up.”
“Then the people deserve to know!”
“They do,” I confess. “And they will, eventually– but not from you, and not from my report. Neither is an option.”
She shakes her head, incredulous. “Then how?”
I walk to the window, rest my hands against the edge. I take a breath. It’s humid, heavy with South American heat. “I’ll figure something out. I always do.”
There’s a heartbeat of silence. Then, she asks the obvious question. “It’s your employer, isn’t it? This whole thing has something to do with The Facility.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I think it does.”
She appears at my side. The two of us stare out across the dark of the base, out at the steel hatch rising from the dirt, where a devil made flesh is inching ever closer. “I thought you said your job was hunting monsters,” she says at length, “not creating them.”
“My job is a lot of things. More than anything else, it’s complicated. The Facility is… Well, it’s not what I’d call a good organization. Or even a moral one.”
“Then what is it?”
I consider the question. “A pragmatic answer to an otherwise ugly question.”
She looks at me expectantly.
“The question of salvation,” I explain. “The question of how do you rescue humanity from a nightmare so twisted that it defies all language? All concept of imagination? There’s something coming for us, Maria, something dark and unfathomable, and these entities– these monsters might be our only chance at fighting back.”
She’s quiet. Her expression is difficult to read.
“Decades ago, The Facility was a very different organization,” I tell her. “In those days, they thought the approaching nightmare was right around the corner, that we had weeks or months until it showed up on our doorstep. They didn’t know. Out of fear, they greenlit any and every possible solution. Or at least, that’s what the rumors say.”
“Rumors?”
I nod, darkly. “There’s no real records of The Facility’s activities during the Cold War. Most documents were destroyed. The few that remain are heavily redacted. I wasn’t around then, obviously, but I picked up bits and pieces from old timers I’ve worked with. They mentioned black projects. Hidden programs. One project was particularly infamous, so much so that even now, half a century later, The Facility hasn’t entirely snuffed out its legend.”
“What project?”
“Project Judas,” I say. “If you believe the rumors, it was headed by a brilliant biochemist named Screech. Jonathan Screech. The aim of the program was to create the ultimate weapon, a monster that could assimilate targets into its being, absorbing their capabilities. Such a function would provide it with a near limitless power ceiling. The problem was–”
Something hits my ears. Maria’s hand finds my arm, squeezing it painfully.
“Do you hear that?” she hisses.
Steel rattles in the distance. There’s a low groan of warping metal, like the rungs of a ladder slumping beneath the weight of something titanic. There’s something beneath us. It’s inside of that bunker, climbing that old ladder, and it’s making its way to the surface.
“We’ve gotta run!” Maria tugs at my arm, but I keep my feet planted where they are. My eyes narrow. I stare at the now trembling steel wheel, lit up beneath the light of the jungle moon.
Maria stumbles backward. A smile finds its way onto my face. In the distance, across the ruins of the base, the bunker’s hatch is thrown open. A dark shape emerges. It buzzes like television static, framed in shafts of moonlight. Its twin eyes glow like cinders. The shadow lurches, looking around, scanning the base and emitting a low electric hum.
“That’s it…” Maria whimpers. “Oh God… that’s it…”
The creature sees us. It sees me. It takes a shambling step forward, and dust and dirt flies into the air beneath its weight. Its eyes smolder, growing and growing until they become a blaze of fire. Maria is on the ground. She’s hiding beneath the window sill, reefing on the fabric of my pants and pleading with me to run, but I hardly notice she’s there.
This shadow– this monster, is why I’ve come here tonight.
Now, we finish things.
A wave of arctic air passes through my mind. It’s just as she described. My heart slams as I feel this Shadow rifle through my thoughts, chewing on my memories. I close my eyes. I breathe deep, inviting it in. Go ahead. Have your fill.
And then with one final shiver, the cold in my skull fades. That Shadow retreats, pulls back from my mind and when I open my eyes, I see it gazing back at me. The fire in its eyes dims to that cinderglow. It tilts its head skyward. Six black wings burst from its back in a shower of static.
“What’s happening?” Maria asks frantically, still on the ground beneath the window. “How are you going to kill it?”
“I’m not,” I tell her.
The Shadow belts out one last distorted howl before launching itself into the air like a streak of night. Three flaps of its wings, and it’s gone. Vanished into the sky, lost amongst the clouds.
Maria rises to her feet. Her eyes are wide. She’s shaking, her entire body is shaking with a tidal wave of horror. “Oh no…” she mutters, gazing at the sky. “It’s gone… So many are going to die…”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I hope so.”
She turns to me then, angry. Stunned. “You told me your job was stopping those things! Hunting them! What’s the deal, asshole? Why’d you just let it fly off?”
“Because I never finished my story.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me…”
“Project Judas had a directive,” I explain. “A very specific one. Its purpose was to assimilate hostile entities, to annihilate monsters and boogeymen, and ensure the survival of our species. Simply put, it was never made to hurt humans. After everything you’ve told me, I’m not convinced it can.”
She crosses her arms, looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Were you even listening to what I said? I found a fucking graveyard down there. It burned John’s skull to a crisp, cracked it open, and ate his brains. I don’t care what it was designed for– I watched it kill a human right in front of me.”
“I’m not certain you did.” I lift up my briefcase, paying my now ashen clipboard one final, farewell glance. “From everything you described, I question whether John was a man at all by the time he took you down to that bunker. If he really was Johnathan Screech, and I think the evidence points to yes, then it’s said he conducted more than a few experiments on himself along the way. The glowing eyes? I’ve never met a human with a set of those.”
“But–”
“Fact is, John brought you here to kill you. John told you that he needed to feed you to his child, that he didn’t have a choice…” My thoughts turn to all the strange disappearances that lead me here. The missing entities. The absentee urban legends. “He was feeding Judas a steady supply of horrors, just enough to keep it from entering hibernation– right up until the moment he ran out. That’s why he pulled you down there. He thought you’d be an easy mark, that maybe with a little creative twisting of the narrative, he could convince Judas that you were close enough to food.
"Remember how he kept calling you a monster? Unfortunately for John, he misunderstood his own creation. Project Judas wasn’t designed to harm human beings. It went against its core directive. So in that moment, when John offered you as a sacrifice, a flip switched in Judas that made it realize John had crossed the threshold and become a monster himself.”
She’s quiet as we walk out the door. “You think he really was that Johnathan Screech guy?”
I shrug. “Maybe. I doubt there are dental records to double check, but based on what you’ve said tonight, it wouldn’t surprise me if Screech couldn’t let his project die. A creature like Judas… The Facility probably didn’t have a means of terminating it, so they buried it instead. Sealed it behind blast doors a kilometer beneath the earth. Then they erased all records of this base ever existing.” My SUV is gleaming black, impossible to miss against the ruinous backdrop of ancient humvees. I crack the passenger door. “Need a ride?”
She smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile all night, and I can’t help but smile back. “Thank you,” she says. “For not killing me.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She clambers into the seat, and just as I’m about to close the door, she stops me. “Wait,” she says quickly. “I forgot earlier, but John mentioned another entrance. One used for freight… That’s probably how he got back into the bunker after they sealed it up. He seemed to know everything about that place.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I figure he must have.”
I close the door and circle to the driver's side.
“So what do we do now,” she asks as I hop in. “About that thing, Project Judas?”
"Nothing," I say, plugging the key into the ignition and giving it a twist. The engine rumbles to life. “As far as I’m concerned, that creature isn’t a monster. And that means it’s not my problem.”
The vehicle rattles as we pull out of the base and onto the jungle road. Maria twists in her seat. She looks back through the rear window as her worst memory falls further and further behind us. “If it isn’t a monster, then what it is it?” she asks.
Words drift around my head. Definitions. I’m trying to figure out how to explain what it is that she and I saw, what it is that more people will see in the coming weeks. I’m trying to think of a way to tell Maria that whatever that thing was, she doesn’t need to be afraid of it. None of us do.
I open my mouth to reply, but I’m interrupted by a microphone howl. It’s distant. Far away. I crane my head and look up through the scatter of vines passing above us. And then I see it. A dark speck on the horizon. It’s little more than a dot against the moonstreaked clouds, but I know that if it were closer, I’d see a creature with six wings. I’d see a shadow with cinderlight eyes. A body of black static.
I’d see a guardian angel– one with plenty of work to do.
submitted by Born-Beach to TheCrypticCompendium [link] [comments]
My jaw clenches. It’s my turn to go pale with shock. Suddenly, the puzzle pieces begin to connect in my mind. They’re building a picture that I’m not sure I want to see, but it’s a picture that’s becoming difficult to deny. “Why?” I press. “What makes you so sure they weren’t just test subjects like the others?”
“These felt different,” Maria says quickly. “Horrible in a way that even the others couldn’t compare to. It’s like when you look at a manikin, or a doll… What’s the phrase?”
“Uncanny valley,” I offer.
“That’s it,” she says. “That’s what I felt looking at these things, the uncanny valley. It was like they didn’t have a soul– like they never had a soul. Some looked human. Nearly. But they were too tall, or their limbs were too long, or they had too many teeth in all the wrong places. But what scared me most of all wasn’t the bodies, it was the thought that something had killed those things. Something had torn literal nightmares to pieces, and there was a good chance it was coming to do the same thing to me and John.
“John,” I say, still trying to parse his significance in her ordeal. “That many bodies couldn’t have appeared overnight. They’d been there for a long time. That means he probably knew about them, didn’t he?”
She nods, gasping. “He knew. He fucking knew. He shoved me onto that pile of corpses, that festering and decaying pit of monsters and told me as much. He started shouting. Call me a monster all over again. Evil, he said. Twisted. He kept pointing at me like all of this was my fault, and he hadn’t both led us to our deaths.”
Her voice becomes a stuttering mess. “A-all the while I heard that thing in the dark. Approaching. I felt terrified, hopeless and numb. I kept asking John why me? Why go through all this trouble just to kill me? And he told me that he didn’t have a choice. He knelt next to me, put a hand on my cheek and whispered that his child needed to feed. It was getting hungry. Desperate. He almost looked fucking r-remorseful if you can believe it, and he told me that he was really sorry, and that he hated to do this but… He stepped away from me. Stood against the wall of the chamber. Watched. Waited.”
For a second, I’m afraid Maria is going to break into fresh sobs, but she pushes through.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she continues, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I didn’t have anywhere to run, anywhere to hide, so I just lay there in that heap of monsters. I gave up. The whole time, those footsteps got closer and closer. The nearer they came, the slower they got. It was like it knew I was trapped. Like it’d done this before, and knew there wasn’t a rush…” She looks up at me. “Do you think… John did that to other people too?”
“It’s certainly possible. Did you get a good look at the creature?”
She shudders. “Yes. I had my headlamp trained on the passage the whole time, and when it appeared around the corner, I almost missed it. I heard it, but I could barely see it. It was a tall, flickering shadow. It pulsed. Vibrated. The way it moved was jerky, haphazard, almost like it had one foot in our reality, like it was glitching with every step it took.”
“Glitching…” I mutter. Why does that sound familiar?
“That’s right,” she says. “And that wasn’t even the strangest thing about it.” She gets small in her chair. “It had these eyes. Amber ones. Bright and gleaming, like twin cinders smoldering in empty space. It felt like they were piercing me, like its eyes were digging through my skin and looking into my mind. Or my soul. It was like that thing was taking bites out of my memories, tasting them before spitting back out…”
“How did it feel? Painful?”
“No, she says. “It felt cold. Like a blizzard in my head, like all my thoughts had frozen to a crawl. Maybe that’s why I calmed down. I don’t know… I remember sitting there, totally numb as the Shadow phased through the metal bars of the gate. It almost looked human. It had two arms, two legs and a head, but its body was made of black static. Like television interference.”
Television interference… Where have I heard that description before? I rack my mind for a match, some kind of urban legend or ancient lore that matches what she’s saying, but nothing jumps out. I flip through the pages of my clipboard, stopping on one labeled ABERRATE EVENTS. It’s The Facility’s own Most Wanted List. My eyes fly through the cases listed, but there isn’t anything close to what she’s describing.
An idea strikes me.
“Did the Shadow hurt you at all?”
She looks down at her arm. There’s a large gash there, framed by clots of dried blood. “No… I don’t think so,” she says hesitantly. “I got these injuries when I was trying to escape.”
No, of course it didn’t. It had other food available already. “And what happened after it pierced you with its eyes?” I ask.
“It walked past me,” she says. “It walked through that mulch of corpses and headed straight for John. It started speaking along the way. At least, I think it did.”
“What do you mean by speaking?”
“Do you remember how I said it was howling before?”
“I do.”
“Well, this time it was hissing– like a livewire, or static electricity. Whatever it was communicating, John looked panicked. He was crying. Pleading with it. He kept saying that he’d done his best, but there was nothing else out there, so the Shadow would have to make due with me. But the Shadow didn’t seem to care. It grabbed John by his long hair, lifted him up to the ceiling and its cinderlight eyes started gleaming an angry orange.”
My heartbeat races. My pen flies across the clipboard, desperately trying to avoid missing a single detail.
Maria keeps talking. She keeps giving me more of what I need. “John kicked and screamed,” she says. “He begged me to help him, told me that if I didn’t I was every bit the monster he’d said I was and I’d be next… But before he could finish, the Shadow’s eyes flashed and leaked fire. John started shrieking, moaning as his face melted into his skull.”
Maria’s face twists with revulsion. Disgust. She looks away, back to the bunker. I wonder if she’s hearing what I am– that dim rumble of something moving underground, that slow march of an approaching nightmare. Our clock is ticking. It’s not something I can tell her though, because as soon as she starts panicking, I lose the chance to connect the dots I need.
“Maria,” I say, pulling her attention back. “Continue. It’s critical I get these details.”
“Sorry… It’s not a memory I like thinking of but… The Shadow held John there, his legs twitching weakly, and then it grabbed his head and tore it off his neck.” She brings a hand to her mouth, starts nervously biting her nails. “Then it lifted John’s skull to its amber eyes. It opened its mouth and screamed fire. The heat I felt was like an open furnace, like Hell itself. Tendrils of darkness emerged from the Shadow, clutching at John’s scorched skull and cracking it open like an egg.
"His brain spilled out. The Shadow caught it in those tendrils, and brought it into itself. His brain. Like it was fucking assimilating it… Or eating it. ” She looks up at me, and there’s the same angry defiance I saw when we met. “Now do you get it?” she asks. “Now do you see what I mean about this thing being the devil? What else could do something like that?”
A good question. I can think of one entity. Only one. If my guess is correct, then Maria and I get to live to see tomorrow’s sunrise. If it’s wrong, then I need to put a bullet in both our heads before that thing finds us.
All of it hinges on my next question.
“It killed John, then what? What did the Shadow do?”
“It turned back to me,” she says. “It glared at me with those blazing eyes, and I thought I was next. I knew I was. But then I felt another blizzard sweep across my mind, and that was it– I blacked out.”
“Hang on…” I mutter. “What do you mean you blacked out? I found you lying outside of the bunker. How did you escape?”
She shakes her head, frantic. “I don’t have a clue. I blacked out, then the next thing I remember was waking up outside the bunker, with you pouring water on my face and telling me we needed to talk. That’s it.”
She shoots up from her chair. “Christ! We need to leave.”
I blink. “Why?”
“The police. I’ve gotta tell them about John and what he was doing. I’ve gotta tell them about this base. Maybe John brought others here. More victims. Maybe some of them are still alive down there and need help. We need search parties and–”
“Don’t bother,” I say.
She looks at me, stunned.
“The police won’t have any record of John. Tell them where you were, what you saw in that bunker, and they’ll probably kill you.” I reach into my pocket, pull out my lighter and run a thumb down the sparkwheel. It flickers to life. “Fact is, John doesn’t exist. Neither does this base.”
I bring the lighter to the edge of my clipboard. The flame catches a page.
“What the hell are you doing?” Maria exclaims.
“Saving your life,” I say, tossing the clipboard to the floor. It pops and cracks as the fire eats the woman’s story, one word at a time.
“What the fuck? You said you believed me!”
“I still do,” I tell her. “That’s the problem. An hour ago, I had no idea what was going on here, but the more you spoke, the more it started making sense. I realized that you and John were more right than wrong. That there really is a conspiracy here. A cover-up.”
“Then the people deserve to know!”
“They do,” I confess. “And they will, eventually– but not from you, and not from my report. Neither is an option.”
She shakes her head, incredulous. “Then how?”
I walk to the window, rest my hands against the edge. I take a breath. It’s humid, heavy with South American heat. “I’ll figure something out. I always do.”
There’s a heartbeat of silence. Then, she asks the obvious question. “It’s your employer, isn’t it? This whole thing has something to do with The Facility.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I think it does.”
She appears at my side. The two of us stare out across the dark of the base, out at the steel hatch rising from the dirt, where a devil made flesh is inching ever closer. “I thought you said your job was hunting monsters,” she says at length, “not creating them.”
“My job is a lot of things. More than anything else, it’s complicated. The Facility is… Well, it’s not what I’d call a good organization. Or even a moral one.”
“Then what is it?”
I consider the question. “A pragmatic answer to an otherwise ugly question.”
She looks at me expectantly.
“The question of salvation,” I explain. “The question of how do you rescue humanity from a nightmare so twisted that it defies all language? All concept of imagination? There’s something coming for us, Maria, something dark and unfathomable, and these entities– these monsters might be our only chance at fighting back.”
She’s quiet. Her expression is difficult to read.
“Decades ago, The Facility was a very different organization,” I tell her. “In those days, they thought the approaching nightmare was right around the corner, that we had weeks or months until it showed up on our doorstep. They didn’t know. Out of fear, they greenlit any and every possible solution. Or at least, that’s what the rumors say.”
“Rumors?”
I nod, darkly. “There’s no real records of The Facility’s activities during the Cold War. Most documents were destroyed. The few that remain are heavily redacted. I wasn’t around then, obviously, but I picked up bits and pieces from old timers I’ve worked with. They mentioned black projects. Hidden programs. One project was particularly infamous, so much so that even now, half a century later, The Facility hasn’t entirely snuffed out its legend.”
“What project?”
“Project Judas,” I say. “If you believe the rumors, it was headed by a brilliant biochemist named Screech. Jonathan Screech. The aim of the program was to create the ultimate weapon, a monster that could assimilate targets into its being, absorbing their capabilities. Such a function would provide it with a near limitless power ceiling. The problem was–”
Something hits my ears. Maria’s hand finds my arm, squeezing it painfully.
“Do you hear that?” she hisses.
Steel rattles in the distance. There’s a low groan of warping metal, like the rungs of a ladder slumping beneath the weight of something titanic. There’s something beneath us. It’s inside of that bunker, climbing that old ladder, and it’s making its way to the surface.
“We’ve gotta run!” Maria tugs at my arm, but I keep my feet planted where they are. My eyes narrow. I stare at the now trembling steel wheel, lit up beneath the light of the jungle moon.
Maria stumbles backward. A smile finds its way onto my face. In the distance, across the ruins of the base, the bunker’s hatch is thrown open. A dark shape emerges. It buzzes like television static, framed in shafts of moonlight. Its twin eyes glow like cinders. The shadow lurches, looking around, scanning the base and emitting a low electric hum.
“That’s it…” Maria whimpers. “Oh God… that’s it…”
The creature sees us. It sees me. It takes a shambling step forward, and dust and dirt flies into the air beneath its weight. Its eyes smolder, growing and growing until they become a blaze of fire. Maria is on the ground. She’s hiding beneath the window sill, reefing on the fabric of my pants and pleading with me to run, but I hardly notice she’s there.
This shadow– this monster, is why I’ve come here tonight.
Now, we finish things.
A wave of arctic air passes through my mind. It’s just as she described. My heart slams as I feel this Shadow rifle through my thoughts, chewing on my memories. I close my eyes. I breathe deep, inviting it in. Go ahead. Have your fill.
And then with one final shiver, the cold in my skull fades. That Shadow retreats, pulls back from my mind and when I open my eyes, I see it gazing back at me. The fire in its eyes dims to that cinderglow. It tilts its head skyward. Six black wings burst from its back in a shower of static.
“What’s happening?” Maria asks frantically, still on the ground beneath the window. “How are you going to kill it?”
“I’m not,” I tell her.
The Shadow belts out one last distorted howl before launching itself into the air like a streak of night. Three flaps of its wings, and it’s gone. Vanished into the sky, lost amongst the clouds.
Maria rises to her feet. Her eyes are wide. She’s shaking, her entire body is shaking with a tidal wave of horror. “Oh no…” she mutters, gazing at the sky. “It’s gone… So many are going to die…”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I hope so.”
She turns to me then, angry. Stunned. “You told me your job was stopping those things! Hunting them! What’s the deal, asshole? Why’d you just let it fly off?”
“Because I never finished my story.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me…”
“Project Judas had a directive,” I explain. “A very specific one. Its purpose was to assimilate hostile entities, to annihilate monsters and boogeymen, and ensure the survival of our species. Simply put, it was never made to hurt humans. After everything you’ve told me, I’m not convinced it can.”
She crosses her arms, looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Were you even listening to what I said? I found a fucking graveyard down there. It burned John’s skull to a crisp, cracked it open, and ate his brains. I don’t care what it was designed for– I watched it kill a human right in front of me.”
“I’m not certain you did.” I lift up my briefcase, paying my now ashen clipboard one final, farewell glance. “From everything you described, I question whether John was a man at all by the time he took you down to that bunker. If he really was Johnathan Screech, and I think the evidence points to yes, then it’s said he conducted more than a few experiments on himself along the way. The glowing eyes? I’ve never met a human with a set of those.”
“But–”
“Fact is, John brought you here to kill you. John told you that he needed to feed you to his child, that he didn’t have a choice…” My thoughts turn to all the strange disappearances that lead me here. The missing entities. The absentee urban legends. “He was feeding Judas a steady supply of horrors, just enough to keep it from entering hibernation– right up until the moment he ran out. That’s why he pulled you down there. He thought you’d be an easy mark, that maybe with a little creative twisting of the narrative, he could convince Judas that you were close enough to food.
"Remember how he kept calling you a monster? Unfortunately for John, he misunderstood his own creation. Project Judas wasn’t designed to harm human beings. It went against its core directive. So in that moment, when John offered you as a sacrifice, a flip switched in Judas that made it realize John had crossed the threshold and become a monster himself.”
She’s quiet as we walk out the door. “You think he really was that Johnathan Screech guy?”
I shrug. “Maybe. I doubt there are dental records to double check, but based on what you’ve said tonight, it wouldn’t surprise me if Screech couldn’t let his project die. A creature like Judas… The Facility probably didn’t have a means of terminating it, so they buried it instead. Sealed it behind blast doors a kilometer beneath the earth. Then they erased all records of this base ever existing.” My SUV is gleaming black, impossible to miss against the ruinous backdrop of ancient humvees. I crack the passenger door. “Need a ride?”
She smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile all night, and I can’t help but smile back. “Thank you,” she says. “For not killing me.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She clambers into the seat, and just as I’m about to close the door, she stops me. “Wait,” she says quickly. “I forgot earlier, but John mentioned another entrance. One used for freight… That’s probably how he got back into the bunker after they sealed it up. He seemed to know everything about that place.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I figure he must have.”
I close the door and circle to the driver's side.
“So what do we do now,” she asks as I hop in. “About that thing, Project Judas?”
"Nothing," I say, plugging the key into the ignition and giving it a twist. The engine rumbles to life. “As far as I’m concerned, that creature isn’t a monster. And that means it’s not my problem.”
The vehicle rattles as we pull out of the base and onto the jungle road. Maria twists in her seat. She looks back through the rear window as her worst memory falls further and further behind us. “If it isn’t a monster, then what it is it?” she asks.
Words drift around my head. Definitions. I’m trying to figure out how to explain what it is that she and I saw, what it is that more people will see in the coming weeks. I’m trying to think of a way to tell Maria that whatever that thing was, she doesn’t need to be afraid of it. None of us do.
I open my mouth to reply, but I’m interrupted by a microphone howl. It’s distant. Far away. I crane my head and look up through the scatter of vines passing above us. And then I see it. A dark speck on the horizon. It’s little more than a dot against the moonstreaked clouds, but I know that if it were closer, I’d see a creature with six wings. I’d see a shadow with cinderlight eyes. A body of black static.
I’d see a guardian angel– one with plenty of work to do.
2024.04.28 23:11 Daurakin Overclock suggestions - Part 3: Gunner
 | ----- GUNNER OVERCLOCKS ----- submitted by Daurakin to DeepRockGalactic [link] [comments] -- "Lead Storm" Powered Minigun -- Minigun OC: Explosive Centre Barrel Positives:
Minigun OC: Behemoth Plasma Munitions Positives:
-- "Thunderhead" Heavy Autocannon -- Thunderhead OC: Blastmaw Bullets Positives:
Thunderhead OC: Flak Cannon Positives:
Thunderhead OC: Javelin Rounds Positives:
-- "Hurricane" Guided Rocket System -- Hurricane OC: Vulcano Bombardment Positives:
-- "Bulldog" Heavy Revolver -- Bulldog OC: Photon Lance Positives:
Bulldog OC: Wild West Positives:
-- BRT7 Burst Fire Gun -- BRT OC: Machine Pistol Positives:
BRT OC: Hyperdrive Receiver Positives:
-- ArmsKore Coil Gun -- Coil Gun OC: Firewall Projector Positives:
Coil Gun OC: Blastbore Energy Positives:
|
2024.04.28 23:10 HoneyBadgers_ My Experience Running a Marathon with Hardly Any Training
The first thing I want to say before I get into this is: Don't run a marathon without training. I'm willing to bet that most people on this sub know that you shouldn't even attempt to run a marathon without training A LOT first (duh), but I just want to reiterate: what I did was dumb, and shouldn't be attempted.
With all that being said, last week I ran my first marathon, having very little training beforehand. Last year, I signed up for the Blue Ridge Marathon, which is self-advertised as "America's toughest road marathon," having 7,430 feet of elevation change. I had never run a marathon or even a half-marathon before, but I had run XC in high school, and I wanted a reason to get back into shape. Unfortunately, that marathon got cancelled in the middle due to thunderstorms, so I wasn't able to finish it. Though I was really disappointed, I thought, "That's okay, I can just run the one for next year." A couple months later, I signed up for this year's Blue Ridge Marathon.
I planned on starting serious training in January, but it never really happened. I didn't train nearly as much as I should have, due to a number of factors, including low motivation and school work. The months went on, and I never really got serious about my training. My longest run before the actual marathon was 8 miles at an 8:00/mile pace, and that was about a month and a half before the marathon started. After that, I ran on and off. I do play ultimate frisbee on the club team at my college, so I'm relatively active, but practices for that were held only twice a week, and that would be where I did most of my running. For the month leading up to the marathon, I only really did 12-15 miles/week at maximum, with my longest run being 3.5 miles, and never any hill training. For some reason I just lost the motivation.
By the time the marathon came, I figured I might as well attempt it; after all, I already spent the money, and if I didn't finish, it would be my own fault. The first 8 miles were okay. I tried to stay at a 5-5.5 hour pace, and it felt like I wasn't really pushing it at any given time. This section was mostly uphill, and I was encouraged that I didn't feel horrible at this point. Then the downhills came. Honestly, the downhills were the worst part of the run. Doing such low-distance training, my joints and ligaments were not at all prepared for that kind of punishment. It was all mostly down the mountains until about mile 13, and by the end of that, my knees and hips were killing me. By mile 15, my muscles (especially my calves) started to seriously cramp, to the point where I had to stop a few times to stretch and massage them out. I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to finish, but I kept going.
I had to walk a lot from mile 15-21, even on the flat sections, just because I was worried about injuring myself. By mile 22, I was able to pick it up to a slow run (~12:00 pace), mostly because I didn't want to tighten up any more than I already felt. Those last miles I was just wishing it to be over, with my legs being more tired than they ever have before for anything. Finally, I was able to finish, with a time of 5:19. As soon as I stopped running, everything tightened up, and I could hardly walk. I felt like my legs were made of molten lead for the next day or so, before I was finally able to walk somewhat normally again, but not without serious pain.
Even though it was a lot of pain, I really enjoyed the run itself (or at least the first half). Running through the mountains and seeing everything from high up was really awesome, and I wish I had been more prepared so I could enjoy it a little more. I do plan on running it again, but this time with MUCH more training; I'm aiming for a sub-4:30. I plan on running a half-marathon in September as well. The moral of the story is: Don't be like me. Train and be WELL-prepared if you are planning on running a marathon.
submitted by HoneyBadgers_ to Marathon_Training [link] [comments]
With all that being said, last week I ran my first marathon, having very little training beforehand. Last year, I signed up for the Blue Ridge Marathon, which is self-advertised as "America's toughest road marathon," having 7,430 feet of elevation change. I had never run a marathon or even a half-marathon before, but I had run XC in high school, and I wanted a reason to get back into shape. Unfortunately, that marathon got cancelled in the middle due to thunderstorms, so I wasn't able to finish it. Though I was really disappointed, I thought, "That's okay, I can just run the one for next year." A couple months later, I signed up for this year's Blue Ridge Marathon.
I planned on starting serious training in January, but it never really happened. I didn't train nearly as much as I should have, due to a number of factors, including low motivation and school work. The months went on, and I never really got serious about my training. My longest run before the actual marathon was 8 miles at an 8:00/mile pace, and that was about a month and a half before the marathon started. After that, I ran on and off. I do play ultimate frisbee on the club team at my college, so I'm relatively active, but practices for that were held only twice a week, and that would be where I did most of my running. For the month leading up to the marathon, I only really did 12-15 miles/week at maximum, with my longest run being 3.5 miles, and never any hill training. For some reason I just lost the motivation.
By the time the marathon came, I figured I might as well attempt it; after all, I already spent the money, and if I didn't finish, it would be my own fault. The first 8 miles were okay. I tried to stay at a 5-5.5 hour pace, and it felt like I wasn't really pushing it at any given time. This section was mostly uphill, and I was encouraged that I didn't feel horrible at this point. Then the downhills came. Honestly, the downhills were the worst part of the run. Doing such low-distance training, my joints and ligaments were not at all prepared for that kind of punishment. It was all mostly down the mountains until about mile 13, and by the end of that, my knees and hips were killing me. By mile 15, my muscles (especially my calves) started to seriously cramp, to the point where I had to stop a few times to stretch and massage them out. I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to finish, but I kept going.
I had to walk a lot from mile 15-21, even on the flat sections, just because I was worried about injuring myself. By mile 22, I was able to pick it up to a slow run (~12:00 pace), mostly because I didn't want to tighten up any more than I already felt. Those last miles I was just wishing it to be over, with my legs being more tired than they ever have before for anything. Finally, I was able to finish, with a time of 5:19. As soon as I stopped running, everything tightened up, and I could hardly walk. I felt like my legs were made of molten lead for the next day or so, before I was finally able to walk somewhat normally again, but not without serious pain.
Even though it was a lot of pain, I really enjoyed the run itself (or at least the first half). Running through the mountains and seeing everything from high up was really awesome, and I wish I had been more prepared so I could enjoy it a little more. I do plan on running it again, but this time with MUCH more training; I'm aiming for a sub-4:30. I plan on running a half-marathon in September as well. The moral of the story is: Don't be like me. Train and be WELL-prepared if you are planning on running a marathon.
2024.04.28 23:09 tonemaz5 TributeRP Quality roleplay LSPD/EMS open interviews! 70+ a Night! Looking for more EU players EVERYONE is welcome! Gangs Actively Recruiting but also Offering free Gang Packages! Money+Car for new players, open a ticket! Come join for a forever home :)
 | Hi! We at TributeRP would like to offer you the chance to come try out our server! TributeRP is a serious server, but we also don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we focus heavily on quality RolePlay, with plenty of silliness and goofiness abound! We have a lot of different types of Player-Owned jobs hiring, and Custom Developed Scripts for the many of the activities found in our city. It’s a well curated and toxicity free community full of respectful and close-nit players and it has a lot of potential to grow! Come join us! submitted by tonemaz5 to FiveMServers [link] [comments] Gang Package: Fly in with a group of 5+ people and provide good roleplay, and the server will provide you with a gang package, all for free, as a reward for bringing quality roleplay to our server.. The package will come with: An MLO/Safehouse, gang car for all founding members, Gang drug OR gun, 5 pieces of gang clothes, Turf on Map, Sprays + other Criminal Activities. https://discord.gg/tributerp connect.tributerp.com Recent Updates: ● More Realistic Player Faces: replaced vanilla face textures plus +46 new face shapes and textures! ● Sewer System ● New Clothing Stores ● Clicklovers ● NoPixel Server-side Visual Assets TributeRP Activities Overview: ● Trucking and Air Deliveries ● Car Boosting D to S+ ● Vin Scratching ● City Lore with plenty of depth, interconnected with current activities. ● Immersive Gang experience w/ many activities, like Custom Weapons Transports, 10+ Heists, Etc ● Custom Drug Production and Distribution Activities ● Dynamic and Static Black Markets ● Illegal Item and Weapons Crafting ● Organ harvesting/selling Civilian Opportunities: ● DOJ - Lawyers and District attorneys. ● Housing/Real Estate ● Player Owned Businesses Hiring: Limey’s, Cat Cafe, Korean Noodle Shop, Burgershot, cookies, white widow, towing Local Jobs Hiring: ● Trucker, Fisherman, Garbageman, Recycling, etc, 25+ civilian jobs ● Custom Businesses available ● Unique EMS Features ● PD Evidence Sweeping, Blood samples, Bullet casings etc Unique Assets: ● Custom Cars (Non-Branded) ● Custom Clothes(Non-Branded) ● Custom Weapons ● Weed Script with 1000+ Custom strains available for production + selling reputation ● Casino + Prize Wheel spin + Hotel ● Race club/street racing scene ● LSPD Abilities: Taser, Handcuffs, Pistol, SMG, AR, 10+ Cop Cars, Exosuit, Tire Grappler, GSR, MDT, etc, all with appropriate SOPs. ● An Active DOJ! ● Scheduled server events! ● Pretty much anything you can think of, we most likely have it, or we can try our best to make it! |
2024.04.28 23:00 PatientPretty3410 Having a bad day
I'm having a bad day today. I'm feeling down. I'm trying to do everything I can to keep myself in shape, but I'm falling on occasion and I am getting too old to fall. I'm seeing a physiatrist, taking physical therapy, still working full-time to keep my mind active and on top. My husband is getting annoyed with me. Nothing too serious, but I don't think he understands how tired I get. It's funny because he hurt his thumb pretty bad the other day doing yard work and he took a big chunk of skin/flesh out of his thumb. It did look pretty bad, and he wrapped it and took a break from yard work. I kinda chuckled because my leg is like his thumb and I have been dragging it along doing what I have to do with hardly any complaints all my life. I think I would rather have his thumb right now...are you with me? Lol 😆
submitted by PatientPretty3410 to CerebralPalsy [link] [comments]
2024.04.28 22:58 Imaginary_Middle6449 Newly Diagnosed - Looking for positivity!
Hi everyone. 33 year old gay male - 5’ 10” 155 lbs - active in good shape.
Have had moderate mixed ibs I’d say for last 10 years. Issues included urgency, undigested food, greasy stools. Etc.
About a month ago I had my first ever acute diverticulitis flare. I took the prescribed 5 days of Cipro and and Flagyl, and I thought it was completely resolved. I was RELIGIOUS about having Metamucil every night, taking gingeturmeric shots, cooking all vegetables, etc and my bowel movements were the best they have ever been in so so long.
One month later, I woke up randomly with really intense lower abdomen pain and cramping. It felt similar to my diverticulitis flare, but not the same. There was more blood in my stool this time. However I also got diagnosed with a UTI ( I think it is really odd that I got my first ever uti the same time as this flare so I’m hoping maybe the infection caused the inflammation??).
I was really discouraged to have what I think was a second flare so soon.
Im wondering anyone has any stories of maybe just one or two flares and then going back to a pretty normal life?? Just need a little positivity.
submitted by Imaginary_Middle6449 to Diverticulitis [link] [comments]
Have had moderate mixed ibs I’d say for last 10 years. Issues included urgency, undigested food, greasy stools. Etc.
About a month ago I had my first ever acute diverticulitis flare. I took the prescribed 5 days of Cipro and and Flagyl, and I thought it was completely resolved. I was RELIGIOUS about having Metamucil every night, taking gingeturmeric shots, cooking all vegetables, etc and my bowel movements were the best they have ever been in so so long.
One month later, I woke up randomly with really intense lower abdomen pain and cramping. It felt similar to my diverticulitis flare, but not the same. There was more blood in my stool this time. However I also got diagnosed with a UTI ( I think it is really odd that I got my first ever uti the same time as this flare so I’m hoping maybe the infection caused the inflammation??).
I was really discouraged to have what I think was a second flare so soon.
Im wondering anyone has any stories of maybe just one or two flares and then going back to a pretty normal life?? Just need a little positivity.
2024.04.28 22:48 Astanay-D40 How DraftKings Collaborations Shape Its Success
 | DraftKings, a leading sports betting and daily fantasy sports company, has strategically leveraged partnerships to solidify its position in the competitive sports betting industry. These collaborations have played a crucial role in shaping DraftKings' success and have contributed significantly to its growth and market expansion. By forging strategic partnerships with key players in the sports industry, DraftKings has been able to enhance its brand visibility, attract new users, and differentiate itself from competitors. This article explores how DraftKings' collaborations have been instrumental in shaping its success and establishing it as a dominant force in the sports betting market. submitted by Astanay-D40 to data40 [link] [comments] https://preview.redd.it/nlvmwb6j8axc1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=07ab22de21ea436e34dd6c10e33886a826e9acf6 Partnerships with Sports LeaguesDraftKings has established partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, among others. These partnerships have provided DraftKings with access to official league data, allowing the company to offer a wide range of betting options and enhance the overall user experience. Additionally, these collaborations have enabled DraftKings to leverage the popularity of these leagues to attract new users and increase engagement among existing users.One of the key benefits of partnering with sports leagues is the branding opportunities it provides. DraftKings' partnerships with these leagues have allowed the company to use official league logos and branding in its marketing efforts, enhancing its credibility and visibility in the market. Furthermore, these partnerships have enabled DraftKings to offer exclusive promotions and experiences to fans, further increasing its appeal and driving user acquisition. Overall, DraftKings' partnerships with sports leagues have been instrumental in shaping its success. By aligning itself with the most popular and trusted brands in sports, DraftKings has been able to enhance its brand image, attract new users, and establish itself as a leader in the sports betting industry. Team PartnershipsDraftKings' partnerships with individual sports teams have been a cornerstone of its marketing strategy, providing the company with a platform to engage directly with fans and enhance its brand presence. These partnerships are typically multifaceted, involving sponsorship deals, collaborative marketing campaigns, and exclusive promotions.One of the key benefits of team partnerships is the opportunity to create collaborative marketing campaigns that leverage the team's fan base and reach. DraftKings works closely with teams to develop campaigns that resonate with fans, often featuring players and coaches in promotional materials. These campaigns help DraftKings connect with fans on a deeper level, building brand loyalty and driving user engagement. Additionally, team partnerships allow DraftKings to offer exclusive promotions and experiences to fans. These can include VIP experiences, tickets to games, and team-branded merchandise. By providing fans with unique opportunities to engage with their favorite teams, DraftKings enhances its appeal and differentiates itself from competitors. Another benefit of team partnerships is increased brand visibility. Through stadium signage, team merchandise, and other promotional materials, DraftKings' logo and branding are prominently featured at games and events. This increased visibility helps raise awareness of DraftKings among sports fans and reinforces its position as a leading sports betting provider. Overall, DraftKings' partnerships with sports teams have been mutually beneficial, allowing the company to enhance its brand presence and engage with fans in meaningful ways. These partnerships have played a significant role in shaping DraftKings' success and establishing it as a dominant force in the sports betting industry. Media PartnershipsDraftKings has forged strategic partnerships with media companies to enhance its brand presence and reach a wider audience. These partnerships typically involve advertising agreements, content collaborations, and integration into media platforms.
Technology PartnershipsDraftKings has strategically aligned with technology companies to bolster its sports betting platform, ensuring it remains at the forefront of innovation and user experience. These partnerships encompass a range of collaborative efforts, including software development, data analytics, and platform integration.One of the primary facets of DraftKings' technology partnerships is software development. By teaming up with leading technology firms, DraftKings can continuously enhance its platform's user interface, introduce new features, and prioritize aspects such as reliability and security. This ensures that users have a seamless and enjoyable experience when using the platform. Data analytics is another crucial area where DraftKings leverages its partnerships. By working with data analytics companies, DraftKings gains valuable insights into betting trends, player performance data, and other relevant metrics. These insights help DraftKings refine its betting offerings, personalize user experiences, and ultimately drive user engagement and retention. Platform integration is also a key focus of DraftKings' technology partnerships. By integrating its platform with third-party technologies, DraftKings can offer users a more comprehensive betting experience. This includes integrating with payment processors, data providers, and other technology platforms to streamline the betting process and provide users with more options and flexibility. DraftKings' technology partnerships play a crucial role in its ability to stay ahead of the competition and offer a cutting-edge sports betting experience to its users. By collaborating with technology companies, DraftKings ensures that its platform remains innovative, user-friendly, and competitive in the rapidly evolving sports betting landscape. Local and Regional PartnershipsDraftKings' local and regional partnerships play a crucial role in its market expansion strategy, allowing the company to establish a strong presence in specific regions. These partnerships have resulted in several key outcomes:
Impact of Partnerships on User Acquisition and RetentionDraftKings' strategic partnerships have had a profound impact on its ability to acquire and retain users in the competitive sports betting market. These partnerships have resulted in several key outcomes that have contributed to DraftKings' success.User Acquisition: Partnerships have played a crucial role in attracting new users to DraftKings' platform. By offering exclusive promotions, experiences, and content through its partnerships, DraftKings has been able to entice sports fans to join the platform. These partnerships have helped DraftKings reach a wider audience and convert sports enthusiasts into active users. User Retention: Partnerships have also been instrumental in retaining users on DraftKings' platform. By providing users with unique experiences and content that are only available through partnerships, DraftKings has been able to keep users engaged and loyal. Additionally, partnerships with sports leagues and teams have helped DraftKings maintain a high level of brand visibility, which has contributed to user retention. Brand Differentiation: Partnerships have helped DraftKings differentiate itself from competitors in the sports betting industry. By offering exclusive promotions and experiences through its partnerships, DraftKings has been able to create a unique value proposition for its users. This has helped DraftKings stand out in a crowded market and attract users who are looking for a differentiated betting experience. Overall, DraftKings' partnerships have been instrumental in driving user acquisition and retention, helping the company establish itself as a leader in the sports betting industry. Future of DraftKings' PartnershipsLooking ahead, DraftKings is poised to maintain its strategic focus on partnerships as a cornerstone of its growth strategy in the sports betting industry. As the company continues to expand its presence both domestically and internationally, partnerships will play a crucial role in facilitating this expansion into new markets. By collaborating with local businesses and organizations, DraftKings can tailor its offerings to specific regions and attract users in untapped markets.Partnerships will remain instrumental in driving technological innovation on DraftKings' platform. By partnering with technology companies, DraftKings can continue to enhance its platform with cutting-edge features and offerings. This focus on technology will help DraftKings stay ahead of the competition and provide users with a best-in-class betting experience. Partnerships will continue to be a key driver of user engagement and retention for DraftKings. By offering exclusive promotions, experiences, and content through partnerships, DraftKings can keep users engaged and loyal to the platform. These partnerships will also help DraftKings differentiate itself from competitors and provide users with a unique and compelling betting experience.Partnerships will remain a central pillar of DraftKings' growth strategy, helping the company drive user acquisition, enhance its platform, and expand its reach in the sports betting industry. As DraftKings continues to evolve, partnerships will play a crucial role in shaping its future success. Future of collaborationsDraftKings' strategic partnerships have been instrumental in shaping its success and establishing it as a leader in the sports betting industry. These partnerships have played a crucial role in driving user acquisition and retention, enhancing the platform's features and offerings, and differentiating DraftKings from competitors. Partnerships will continue to be a key focus for DraftKings as it seeks to maintain its position at the forefront of the sports betting market. By leveraging partnerships to expand into new markets, drive technological innovation, and enhance user engagement, DraftKings can continue to grow and evolve in the years to come. DraftKings' partnerships have been a key driver of its success and will remain a critical part of its growth strategy moving forward. As DraftKings continues to innovate and expand, partnerships will play a crucial role in shaping its future trajectory in the sports betting industry. |
2024.04.28 22:46 Chance-Worth-4954 Little story about how it all started..
 | A bit of history.. submitted by Chance-Worth-4954 to IPTVAdviceAndTip [link] [comments] In the 80s and 90s, we have satellite dishes with pirate cards, it worked perfectly, but at that time we didn't have any problems with buffering. ;>)) But there were also people like myself with my own subscriptions to both Viasat & Canal Digital that I paid for. At that time it cost EUR 90 per month in today's currency. If you had the knowledge, you could read the original card and then add another one that you could then sell. The problem then was that anyone who had a little knowledge of how it worked with card readers could then in turn make a copy of what he bought. At that time there was no control over how many users were used. I made my own software so that no one could make a copy of my cards, when it was put in a card reader the card was erased, except for a small "string" where I could see if any attempt to read the card was made... The smartcard used by DirecTV after the “H card” became known by pirates as the “HU” card. This was the third smartcard series for DSS (P3 card - period 3). Sometimes referred to as “the football card” because of the artwork on the back of the card.’ Oddly enough, the “football card” was not the one OJ Simpson was busted for pirating. That was the previous generation of smartcard, the “H card”. https://preview.redd.it/smlkhrx76axc1.jpg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b037b1d67788d32286def83b97d042b3e38f825 By 2001, “HU loader” pirate smartcard programming software hit the market even before the hacked “H card” swap-out was done. Some pirates still used hacked H cards while others were buying new pirate HU cards that would last through the impending complete shutdown of the H card. For prices in the tens of thousands of dollars, dealers bought HU loaders - slightly modified WildThing glitchers, with new software for the new smartcard. The pirate customer base had grown a lot from the previous hacked cards, so there was plenty of demand for the HU hack. Once the HU loader was in the hands of pirates, it wasn’t long before it was cloned. More sources for HU loaders meant competitive prices. Eventually this led to the secret firmware for the HU loader (the “Atmel code”, for the AT90S2313 chip) being posted on a public website. After the HU loader Atmel code was posted on the “HackHU” website, anybody with the right kind of smartcard programmer could program their own pirate HU cards. Some pirates modified the WildThing unlooper they bought for the H card to be compatible with the new HU loader. In the early 2000s, detailed technical information about new hacks, schematics and software, was being spread via the Internet at an accelerated rate. It was no longer a trickle of information from high level dealers filtering down to end users. A pirate might buy an expensive unlooper or loader, think “I could sell a lot of these”, reverse engineer the PCB and draw a schematic, then a locked chip becomes a dead end. So they post schematics online and hope someone else shares the missing pieces. Many hardware producers (like Mikobu) competed to build and sell ready-to-use HU loaders. By 2002, for under a hundred dollars anybody could get everything they needed to program pirate smartcards. It was never easier to become a DirecTV pirate, or even a pirate card dealer. https://preview.redd.it/pad3rdwc6axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=015bb714ef4b0423a65fdf869403e8aca1eaa5df This is another example, a Mikobu III loadeunlooper. The Mikobu III may have been the top selling pirate card programmer in its time, it was considered the “gold standard” to many pirates. https://preview.redd.it/qsk44k6h6axc1.jpg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a499a9cc93a2a8bd5467351fc16d9a47768b45a In 2001, the pirates had to deal with something they recognized all too well by now - their hacked smartcards were looped by a countermeasure against them. A lot of people had gotten used to programming their own smartcards, now they had to hope somebody produced an HU unlooper. As was typical, the first HU unlooper was in the hands of a commercial pirate, unlooping cards for a fee. Later on, though, things took a turn - the growing mass of hackers chatting and sharing information online led to a new kind of development. Not just one, but two kinds of HU unlooper were released and shared freely on the internet within days of each other in March 2002. HUFF (to unloop the HU cards responding only FF due to looping) and ul4s (unloop for sure). They both worked great. https://preview.redd.it/axc4rddl6axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=add5fa4f2cbc84a72e9d9a8642f52ed77f25d346 https://preview.redd.it/lb4d86gm6axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba55d97148c8ce6e91a420c0ccb16ddd4e14ef04 By this time there was a kind of “critical mass” of hackers online, developing and sharing hacks for the HU card. Web forums, usually vBulletin or phpBB, were numerous and very active. Pirates helped each other use hacks and searched for new fixes when their cards were shut down. Popular forums of the time included The Pirates Den (dsschat .com), Interesting Devices (id-discussions), Innermatrix, DR7 .com, Hitec Sat, and dozens of others. Many forums were owned by pirate dealers, and some acted as administrators or moderators on others. Forums weren’t only for end-user pirates, some of the hackers developing new fixes frequented them also. Over time there was a shift from hacks developed in private and sold through a dealer network, to more widespread, and sometimes free, direct sharing over the Internet. Some of the hackers became known and respected by many other pirates who admired the skills required to create new and improved hacks. Names like no1b4me, aol6945, and RAM9999 were amongst the elite in the online forums. https://preview.redd.it/h0wqaetq6axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=faa66dca9cf2f39a868fbd68776b9795e7231cba Some of these hackers’ names would later show up on a DirecTV website publicizing the many legal actions taken against pirates. DirecTV would proudly boast over 24,000 lawsuits against end users, in addition to action against the hackers and dealers. Satellite TV piracy was big business. In 1998, Canadian pirate Reggie Scullion (V-Cipher) was raided by police and $4 million in cash, bonds, and bank drafts was seized from his home and business, along with over 10,000 DirecTV smartcards. Pirate business was booming. By 2003, satellite TV piracy seemed to have been growing out of control for years, despite increasing legal actions against pirates. There were estimates in the press of over 3 million satellite TV pirates, resulting in pay TV companies losing $4 billion in revenue. Most end-user pirates were paying someone to program, or to unloop, their smartcard. The dealers they paid came in all shapes and sizes - friends, family, small businesses, international pirate dealer networks. Hackers were writing their own versions of 3M code (or ripping off someone else’s), packaging it up in a loader program with a Windows GUI, or in some cases a script for the popular Winexplorer tool, and offering it for sale. Pirate software evolved alongside changes in computers and the Internet. From MS-DOS text interfaces to simple Windows applications with two or three buttons, to integrated environments for developing and testing hacks. For the H card, a software package “BasicH” was been popular for being powerful but also relatively simple to use. Later, with the HU card, even more tools like “ExtremeHU” for programming cards and “HU Sandbox” for developing new pirate code became standard tools for hackers. https://preview.redd.it/07rj9fiw6axc1.jpg?width=766&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11baf6c8dcea5fc0b124bde1fb7924a35763b58b WinExplorer was a widely used tool for smartcard hackers, for writing “.XVB files”, VBScript programs that talked to smartcards or smartcard glitchers. Hackers would share, study, and modify an overwhelming number of .XVB files, a de facto standard for pirate satellite scripts. https://preview.redd.it/lu7krltz6axc1.jpg?width=760&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0943808106bba39bcf9f3f0ee7f82adaa612812f Another way used by pirates to watch DirecTV without paying was to use an “emu”, or emulator, system. Using a computer connected to a satellite receiver by a simple PCB interface, the smartcard was emulated to allow all channels to be viewed. Because hackers hadn’t reverse engineered the HU card ASIC, they could only emulate the microcontroller functions while using a real HU card as an “AUX card”, sending data through the hardware ASIC. The emu software protected the original smartcards from ECMs. After each version of DirecTV (or later, Dish Network) smartcard was hacked, versions of emulator hacks were developed by pirates. SLE44 and Pitou were H card emulators, Kryptonite an HU emu. https://preview.redd.it/4mcu5vo37axc1.jpg?width=284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f5779dc53fe15b5fc7100e9c66c3b616164c4178 During the era of the pirate HU card, DirecTV may have had a hard time locking out the pirates with glitchers from programming their smartcards, but there was a lot of grief for the pirates in the form of frequent countermeasures shutting down the hacked cards temporarily. A technique used by the HU card against the pirates was “dynamic code”. Instead of key calculation being done entirely in the ROM and EEPROM firmware known to the hackers, short blocks of program code was sent down in real-time over the satellite. Dynamic code meant the pirate hackers had to chase a moving target. The code could be changed at any time, and different versions of dynamic code could be rotated in and out of service at any time. Sending program code over the satellite had been done before, but on the HU card the dynamic code went beyond what pirates had previously dealt with. Let the code run and risk the card being looped. Block unknown code and the card is shut down every few days. Another electronic countermeasure (ECM) used to target pirate H and HU cards was known as “hashing”. Regions of the smartcard’s memory would be used in the key calculation algorithm, so that the correct decryption keys depended on correct (not hacked) data in the card. The pirate hackers rose to the challenge, improving their hacks, adding “stealth” and “AI” features to their 3M code. The level of artificial intelligence implemented in these 4 MHz micros with a total 384 bytes of RAM and a KB or two of EEPROM space seems suspect, in retrospect. Unlike the H card with two chips (microcontroller and ASIC), the HU card only had one chip inside. The HU card had an ASIC on the same silicon die as a Texas Instruments TMS370 microcontroller. 384 bytes of RAM, 16 KB ROM, 8 KB EEPROM. https://preview.redd.it/m5pby1a87axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4cb7cb084b5a5604e004c6432187753d6bc6f80 Another tactic used by DirecTV to shut down pirate cards was to more aggressively target smartcards that were inactive or had been deactivated in their system. The satellite receiver itself could be disabled, instead of relying on software inside the smartcard to disable itself. The pirates became familiar with the dreaded “Call Ext. 745” messages when their card ID# was disabled - blacklisted by DirecTV. Pirates cloned cards with different ID# or modded the satellite receiver software, and new hacks were developed to bypass the Ext745 shutdowns. One type of hack was a “no745 board” that acted as a wedge between the satellite receiver and smartcard. The no745 board exploited a bug in the receivers, allowing it to provide the receiver with a fake ID#, to avoid any blacklisting by DirecTV. Pirates continued to hack the HU card to watch DirecTV for free, though sometimes having to update their pirate card daily, until the HU smartcard was swapped out to a new “P4” card. The P4 card had increased the level of complexity again to be better protected against hackers. Support for the HU smartcards was disabled permanently by DirecTV in mid-2004. Since then, there has not been a pirate DirecTV hack on the market, or published online. The new P4 smartcards locked the pirates out. https://preview.redd.it/g2oiemxe7axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9872b8a955e71e87b6688a55e24e218e7e66a11 Around that time, a lot of pirates had switched their focus to Dish Network (and Bell Expressvu in Canada), which had been hacked since 1999. That’s another topic with many different stories to be told. In September 2006 at 27 years old, the hacker behind the HU loader, the first pirate hack for the DirecTV HU smartcard, pled guilty to charges carrying up to 5 years in prison. At the time, he was already serving a 30 month prison sentence for hacking DirecTV Latin America. In the years since, he and the other hackers involved in DirecTV piracy in the 90s/early 2000s have completed their prison sentences, been released, and put satellite TV piracy in the past. Then we all had different cards and modules.... Here are some examples that many people probably recognize...' https://preview.redd.it/a1wziizx7axc1.jpg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=10309493a65c92d523b18f49c62c673b8c2d9859 https://preview.redd.it/1pq6956n7axc1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b874c1fc4b100a30064dda1d255013ccc5196594 https://preview.redd.it/2y580dep7axc1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=677199c3d1a2c705abb79f4217062e5c1956e718 https://preview.redd.it/5sbfv7ar7axc1.jpg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1ee313f5b5233e3ca0b417b51f785cfd4c667432 https://preview.redd.it/8fe623vs7axc1.jpg?width=925&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9c00f5e3488ec8bb6e4c67bc079fd477ab943bcc https://i.redd.it/56phv56u7axc1.gif A little history for those of you who weren't there at the time, when we had to do everything ourselves. Now we have IPTV which is very easy compared to the time before. Next entry, is an IPTV Guide. A jungle for most of them, even those who call themselves Resellers barely know what they are talking about when they advertise.. Most of them do NOT know what it is they have and write what they think, so BEWARE!! |
2024.04.28 22:45 ArtyCatz Malfunction indicator light
I have a 2012 Camry with 160K miles, and today I was driving and the car shuddered a little and then both the malfunction indicator light (the one that’s shaped sorta like a video camera) and the Active Traction Control Indicator light came on (even though it wasn’t raining and I was on dry, smooth pavement).
I pulled off the highway and got the car towed to my mechanic, but since it’s Sunday, they won’t be in to look at it until tomorrow.
A friend who knows a little about cars said the malfunction light means something going on with the electronic system but didn’t know what the other light indicated.
Any ideas what the two lights coming on at the same time might mean? And is there any way I’m getting out of this repair for a price that isn’t astronomical?
submitted by ArtyCatz to Camry [link] [comments]
I pulled off the highway and got the car towed to my mechanic, but since it’s Sunday, they won’t be in to look at it until tomorrow.
A friend who knows a little about cars said the malfunction light means something going on with the electronic system but didn’t know what the other light indicated.
Any ideas what the two lights coming on at the same time might mean? And is there any way I’m getting out of this repair for a price that isn’t astronomical?
2024.04.28 22:31 Sad_Ad3625 Vital Roleplay 2024 - Whitelisted - Economy - Unique Scripts - PD/Crim/Businesses/Civilian - Open playtest this weekend!
Vital Roleplay is a whitelisted Grand Theft Auto V roleplay community that first released on an alternative platform in 2022. We are a serious FiveM community that has been together since 2020.
Discord: https://discord.gg/hKFJEA4VXv
At the heart of Vital Roleplay lies a commitment to authenticity and professionalism, reflected in our robust ruleset and active staff team. Whether patrolling the streets as law enforcement officers, navigating the treacherous waters of organized crime, or pursuing careers in legitimate businesses, players can expect a rich and immersive experience shaped by realistic roleplaying standards and supported by well developed game mechanics.
Let’s take a look at some of our features…
https://youtu.be/znb3WqJjLYM
https://youtu.be/y37knbAHlKc
https://youtu.be/RFQPm-dN0HY
https://i.imgur.com/xmyUbCe.png
Rob bank trucks for a haul of dirty money and valuable items that are otherwise unobtainable! Rob the truck alone or with your friends but be careful… there are armed guards inside of the money truck that will shoot on sight! https://youtu.be/cTH-27GlG1E
Unique & Detailed Store Robberies
In your spare time you can rob stores for cash - the store owner will try and stop you though. Take the store owner down, steal the till keys and safe code to steal the money!! https://youtu.be/akrbbwINka8
Detailed Bank Robberies
Plan out and execute detailed bank robberies. Grab your drill, hacking equipment, guns and friends to rob the local fleeca bank! https://youtu.be/OWeyxrFn1zw
Insane Turf System
Claim turf with your criminal faction by selling drugs, fighting with other gangs or tagging other gangs turfs to take it over! https://youtu.be/Q4D4Ch3nm98
In-depth Crafting Access the criminal faction crafting bench to upgrade and repair illegal weapons! https://i.imgur.com/yleQoGI.png
Illegal delivery system
Complete illegal deliveries with your friends or gang, watch out for rival gangs or the cops! They may be interested in what you’re doing :wink:
https://www.tiktok.com/@vitalrp/video/7355900957533719840?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7355896469792687659
submitted by Sad_Ad3625 to FiveMRPServers [link] [comments]
Discord: https://discord.gg/hKFJEA4VXv
At the heart of Vital Roleplay lies a commitment to authenticity and professionalism, reflected in our robust ruleset and active staff team. Whether patrolling the streets as law enforcement officers, navigating the treacherous waters of organized crime, or pursuing careers in legitimate businesses, players can expect a rich and immersive experience shaped by realistic roleplaying standards and supported by well developed game mechanics.
Let’s take a look at some of our features…
MULTIPLE PUBLIC JOBS!
Explore our public job systems with gold panning, mining, fishing, delivery jobs, farming,https://youtu.be/znb3WqJjLYM
https://youtu.be/y37knbAHlKc
https://youtu.be/RFQPm-dN0HY
Government Employment
Los Santos Police Department :police_car: Join our team of 40+ dedicated law enforcement officers before the server has even released! Join our SWAT, K9, CID, Training, Recruit divisions and more! https://i.imgur.com/OYkH4aM.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/xmyUbCe.png
Criminal World!
Money Trucks 💵Rob bank trucks for a haul of dirty money and valuable items that are otherwise unobtainable! Rob the truck alone or with your friends but be careful… there are armed guards inside of the money truck that will shoot on sight! https://youtu.be/cTH-27GlG1E
Unique & Detailed Store Robberies
In your spare time you can rob stores for cash - the store owner will try and stop you though. Take the store owner down, steal the till keys and safe code to steal the money!! https://youtu.be/akrbbwINka8
Detailed Bank Robberies
Plan out and execute detailed bank robberies. Grab your drill, hacking equipment, guns and friends to rob the local fleeca bank! https://youtu.be/OWeyxrFn1zw
Insane Turf System
Claim turf with your criminal faction by selling drugs, fighting with other gangs or tagging other gangs turfs to take it over! https://youtu.be/Q4D4Ch3nm98
In-depth Crafting Access the criminal faction crafting bench to upgrade and repair illegal weapons! https://i.imgur.com/yleQoGI.png
Illegal delivery system
Complete illegal deliveries with your friends or gang, watch out for rival gangs or the cops! They may be interested in what you’re doing :wink:
https://www.tiktok.com/@vitalrp/video/7355900957533719840?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7355896469792687659
2024.04.28 22:30 Sad_Ad3625 Vital Roleplay 2024 - Whitelisted - Open playtest this weekend!
Vital Roleplay is a whitelisted Grand Theft Auto V roleplay community that first released on an alternative platform in 2022. We are a serious FiveM community that has been together since 2020.
Discord: https://discord.gg/hKFJEA4VXv
At the heart of Vital Roleplay lies a commitment to authenticity and professionalism, reflected in our robust ruleset and active staff team. Whether patrolling the streets as law enforcement officers, navigating the treacherous waters of organized crime, or pursuing careers in legitimate businesses, players can expect a rich and immersive experience shaped by realistic roleplaying standards and supported by well developed game mechanics.
Let’s take a look at some of our features…
https://youtu.be/znb3WqJjLYM
https://youtu.be/y37knbAHlKc
https://youtu.be/RFQPm-dN0HY
https://i.imgur.com/xmyUbCe.png
Rob bank trucks for a haul of dirty money and valuable items that are otherwise unobtainable! Rob the truck alone or with your friends but be careful… there are armed guards inside of the money truck that will shoot on sight! https://youtu.be/cTH-27GlG1E
Unique & Detailed Store Robberies
In your spare time you can rob stores for cash - the store owner will try and stop you though. Take the store owner down, steal the till keys and safe code to steal the money!! https://youtu.be/akrbbwINka8
Detailed Bank Robberies
Plan out and execute detailed bank robberies. Grab your drill, hacking equipment, guns and friends to rob the local fleeca bank! https://youtu.be/OWeyxrFn1zw
Insane Turf System
Claim turf with your criminal faction by selling drugs, fighting with other gangs or tagging other gangs turfs to take it over! https://youtu.be/Q4D4Ch3nm98
In-depth Crafting Access the criminal faction crafting bench to upgrade and repair illegal weapons! https://i.imgur.com/yleQoGI.png
Illegal delivery system
Complete illegal deliveries with your friends or gang, watch out for rival gangs or the cops! They may be interested in what you’re doing :wink:
https://www.tiktok.com/@vitalrp/video/7355900957533719840?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7355896469792687659
submitted by Sad_Ad3625 to FiveMServers [link] [comments]
Discord: https://discord.gg/hKFJEA4VXv
At the heart of Vital Roleplay lies a commitment to authenticity and professionalism, reflected in our robust ruleset and active staff team. Whether patrolling the streets as law enforcement officers, navigating the treacherous waters of organized crime, or pursuing careers in legitimate businesses, players can expect a rich and immersive experience shaped by realistic roleplaying standards and supported by well developed game mechanics.
Let’s take a look at some of our features…
MULTIPLE PUBLIC JOBS!
Explore our public job systems with gold panning, mining, fishing, delivery jobs, farming,https://youtu.be/znb3WqJjLYM
https://youtu.be/y37knbAHlKc
https://youtu.be/RFQPm-dN0HY
Government Employment
Los Santos Police Department :police_car: Join our team of 40+ dedicated law enforcement officers before the server has even released! Join our SWAT, K9, CID, Training, Recruit divisions and more! https://i.imgur.com/OYkH4aM.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/xmyUbCe.png
Criminal World!
Money Trucks 💵Rob bank trucks for a haul of dirty money and valuable items that are otherwise unobtainable! Rob the truck alone or with your friends but be careful… there are armed guards inside of the money truck that will shoot on sight! https://youtu.be/cTH-27GlG1E
Unique & Detailed Store Robberies
In your spare time you can rob stores for cash - the store owner will try and stop you though. Take the store owner down, steal the till keys and safe code to steal the money!! https://youtu.be/akrbbwINka8
Detailed Bank Robberies
Plan out and execute detailed bank robberies. Grab your drill, hacking equipment, guns and friends to rob the local fleeca bank! https://youtu.be/OWeyxrFn1zw
Insane Turf System
Claim turf with your criminal faction by selling drugs, fighting with other gangs or tagging other gangs turfs to take it over! https://youtu.be/Q4D4Ch3nm98
In-depth Crafting Access the criminal faction crafting bench to upgrade and repair illegal weapons! https://i.imgur.com/yleQoGI.png
Illegal delivery system
Complete illegal deliveries with your friends or gang, watch out for rival gangs or the cops! They may be interested in what you’re doing :wink:
https://www.tiktok.com/@vitalrp/video/7355900957533719840?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7355896469792687659
2024.04.28 22:25 CaiusAegis Modded Game Issue
I've been using a few small mods for a while now but I decided to just pump my game full cause I wanted to mess around a bit. So I downloaded a handful of CC mods and class mods to add subclasses and a few full classes. I'm fully aware modding is a trial and error system (Done a lot of Skyrim in the past) so I knew there would properly be an issue or two.
The only issue I have at the moment is the game simply won't open. The launcher will come up, I'll hit play, then nothing will happen. But in the task manager the be3.exe will be running despite the game not being open. I'm assuming this is a mod load order situation but I have no idea what my load order needs to look like.
I'll post below my current mod list in BG3 Mod Manager. If anyone can help me out that'd be awesome. If it's not a mod load order issue then if anyone has an idea of what I can do that would also be awesome!
https://preview.redd.it/8d4j3igm4axc1.png?width=1889&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9da7d1d89ba596862be6fa6db8a610e7f185f85
https://preview.redd.it/0bydfjvo4axc1.png?width=1892&format=png&auto=webp&s=72a81b33300ba72ea1843def033d9e42709517c1
submitted by CaiusAegis to BaldursGate3 [link] [comments]
The only issue I have at the moment is the game simply won't open. The launcher will come up, I'll hit play, then nothing will happen. But in the task manager the be3.exe will be running despite the game not being open. I'm assuming this is a mod load order situation but I have no idea what my load order needs to look like.
I'll post below my current mod list in BG3 Mod Manager. If anyone can help me out that'd be awesome. If it's not a mod load order issue then if anyone has an idea of what I can do that would also be awesome!
https://preview.redd.it/8d4j3igm4axc1.png?width=1889&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9da7d1d89ba596862be6fa6db8a610e7f185f85
https://preview.redd.it/0bydfjvo4axc1.png?width=1892&format=png&auto=webp&s=72a81b33300ba72ea1843def033d9e42709517c1
2024.04.28 22:22 DustSnitch [Spoilers C1E63] The Echo Tree Turn By Turn
| Initiative | Action | Effect | Current HP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vax | Use Boots of Haste, Attack (hit, hit, hit) | Saundor -45 | Saundor: -45 |
| Percy | Disarming Attack (crit, reload) Cast Hex L1, Disarming Attack (hit) | Saundor -26 | Saundor: -71 |
| Lair | Confusion Fog | Keyleth -12, Scanlan -12, Vax -12, Vex -12 | Scanlan: 107/119, Keyleth: 93/105, Vex: 92/104, Vax: 79/91 |
| Grog | Chain of Returning Attack (hit) Saundor Casts a Spell Scanlan Casts Counterspell L5 | Saundor -26 | Saundor: -97 |
| Saundor | Regenerate, Bramble Shot (hit), Attack (hit, hit) | Saundor +20. Grog -20, Vex -23 | Saundor -77, Grog: 172/192 Vex 69/104 |
| Treant 1 | Attack (hit, hit) | Percy -45 | Percy: 67/112 |
| Treant 2 | Attack (miss, hit) Vax Uses Uncanny Dodge | Vax -9 | Vax: 70/91 |
| Scanlan | Activate Wand of Fireballs (5 charges), Cast Healing Word L2 | Saundor -16, Percy +10 | Saundor: -93 and 2/3 Legendary Resistances, Percy: 77/112 |
| Keyleth | Cast Tree Stride L5, Wild Shape (Fire Elemental), Multiattack (hit, hit) | Treant 1 -78 Fire Keyleth +102 | Treant 1: -78, Fire Keyleth: 102/102 |
| Vex | Treant Opportunity Attack (hit), Cast Hunter's Mark L1, Storm Arrow Attack (miss, crit, miss, hit), Saundor Casts Reverse Gravity L7 | Saundor -63, Vex -29, Scanlan -24, Percy -24, Fire Keyeth -12, Treant 1 -12, Treant 2 -12, Tree Stride Ends | Saundor: -156, Treant 1: -90 Treant 2: -12 Fire Keyleth: 90/102, Scanlan: 83/107, Percy 53/112, Vex: 40/104 |
| Round 2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Vax | Attack (hit, hit, hit), Saundor Attacks (miss) | Treant -40 (though one of them might be doubled double check) | |
| Percy | Attack (miss, miss, miss) | ||
| Lair | Vines | Scanlan Restrained | |
| Grog | Climb, Howl | ||
| Saundor | Regenerate, Attack (hit, hit, miss), Grog Opportunity Attack (hit) | Saundor -3, Grog -18 | Saundor: -159, Grog: 154/192 |
| Treant 1 | Dies | Treant 1 -12 | |
| Treant 2 | Attack (hit, hit) | Percy -23, Treant 2 -12, Hex Ends | Percy: 30/112, |
| Scanlan | Activate Wand of Fireballs (3 charges), Cast Healing Word L3 | Saundor -14, Vex +12 | Saundor -173, Vex: 52/104 |
| Fire Keyleth | Multiattack (hit, hit), Saundor Casts Blight L4 | Treant 2 -68, Vex -16, Hunter's Mark Ends | Vex: 36/104 |
| Vex | Drink Greater Healing Potion, Cast Hail of Thorns L3, Attack (hit), Saundor Attacks (hit) | Saundor -20, Vex -1 | Saundor -193, Vex: 35/104 (wrong, she's at 37 before saundor's attack |
| Round 3 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Vax | Attack (hit, hit, hit) | Treant 2 -47 (or 23) | |
| Percy | Attack (hit, hit, hit) | Treant 2 -35 | Treant 2: Dead ( |
| Lair | Low Mist | ||
| Ukurat | Dash | ||
| Grog | Dash | Grog -8 | Grog: 146/192 |
| Saundor | Regenerate, Ukurat Opportunity Attack (hit), Multiattack (hit, hit, crit), Percy Activates Glove of Missile Snaring | Saundor +20, Vex -30, Percy -17 | Saundor: -188, Percy 13/112, Vex: 0/104 (she should be at 5, but Laura made a mistake somewhere) |
| Keyleth | Hold Action (Multiattack) | ||
| Scanlan | Cast Healing Word L1, Cast Bigby's Hand L5, Sondur Attacks (miss) | Vex +8, Fire Keyleth -2, thrown by Bigby's Hand | Fire Keyleth: 88/102, Vex: 8/104, |
| Vex | Drink Superior Healing Potion, Blazing Bowstring Attack (miss), Attack (hit), Saundor Casts Blight L4 | Saundor -15, Vex +8 | Saundor: -203, Vex: 16/104 |
| Round 4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Vax | Activates Wings of the Deathwalker's Ward, Attack (hit, hit) | Saundor -18 | Saundor: -221 |
| Percy | Disarming Attack (reload, hit, reload), Action Surge Attack (hit, reload, hit) | Saundor -33 | Saundor: -254 and 1/3 Legendary Resistances |
| Lair | N/A | ||
| Grog | Lightning of Javelin Attack | Saundor -12, How Do You Want to Do This? | Saundor: 0 (-266) |
2024.04.28 22:17 kiltedfrog Andurian recovers Flox, and much more.
Andurian was the strangest healer anyone had ever seen. He wore a black and purple robe, had a fancy staff (the only normal healer thing about him) and a powerful magic sword on his hip. Though not uncommon, the amount he had was excessive; he had five magic rings on one hand and three on the other. You could feel the magic flowing off his sword, staff, and particularly those rings, at pretty much all times. The power was like a gentle breeze constantly flowing outward from his gear that you could only feel with your magi-sense. At first it was startling, the kind of thing that would cause an entire tavern to stop making noise the moment he entered, and resume a moment later when they all realized it was just Andurian.
He'd made himself well known around town when he appeared out of no where and saved the lives of a handful of Steel Tier Adventurers after they killed the Tyrannus Lizard. It had bit their healer in half during the battle and somehow he even saved her too.
Vincent the Brave had introduced him to the guild, and he immediately signed up. Everyone starts at Tin tier, but Andurian rose up the ranks quickly. Clearly his ability to mend flesh was second to none, and he never seemed to tired from casting like most healers. When he wasn't out adventuring he worked, FOR FREE, at the medical clinic.
Well... Free in terms of currency, what he was really getting paid in was information. Every adventurer he healed talked with him, told him anything he wanted to know. He was, after all, the only healer that includes pain killing magic with his heals. Most healers will stitch you back together through screaming pain, but Andurian will put your whole damn arm back on and somehow give you an Armgasm as the same time.
Rumors about him spread too, far and wide. Six months after he arrived the first Adamantine adventurers started showing up at our town trying to recruit him. He was still technically only an Iron tier Adventurer when he turned down the Falconeer and her crew. Terrestria and the Earthlings also got shot down, though he did cure two of the Earthlings of a fungal infection they'd had for nigh on a decade that their old healer said was 'Impossible to fix'.
Andurian never permanently joined a party, at least for nine month he hadn't. He'd do one job with a random party here, and another there, nothing that was supposed to get too terribly dangerous, though the missions he chose always seemed to get out of hand somehow. Randomly coming across an undead horde, or a lindwyrm, or a pack of dire wolves. The tales the returning adventurers would tell would be fantastical. Tanks cut clean in two, and restored in mere seconds, back to fully fighting fit. Or an arm that was reattached from a distance, unlike other healers he didn't need to be touching you to heal. He never seemed to attack, he would use his staff to defend himself if a stray goblin or wolf came at him. Parrying and dodging while still healing, until help arrived to slay whatever it was attacking him.
The rumors about this man had become so powerful that if he asked to join your party you almost couldn't say no. Was it probably going to be one hell of a mission gone sideways? Almost assuredly. Would everyone survive? Also, without a doubt, so long as the man in the black and purple robes came with. Parties that had gone out and had haywire adventures with Andurian also seemed to level up pretty quickly afterward. The Tigers went from Bronze to Steel as a party within two months of their time with him, and that was pretty much the typical result.
Also, he'd never been said to join the same party twice. So the Scrip Scrappers were quite surprised when he approached their table at the tavern the day before their first mission out after their 'turn' being bless by him.
"I am coming with you." He told them, a serious look on his face. the entire tavern silenced to listen in. They all knew this was odd... odder than normal with Andurian.
Dean, the leader of the Scrip Scrappers swallowed hard into the sudden silence. "I... Uhm. What?" He wasn't mentally ready to be devoured whole by another Grunchalope Alpha, or whatever the future happened to have in store for him on this adventure out with Andurian.
"I am coming with you." Andurian repeated. "Your party will need me."
He never explained why he was joining parties, he just told them he joining. Dean's face drained of all color.
Samantha, the Scrip Scrappers regular healer smiled and placed her a hand on Dean's shoulder. "We would be honored to have you along again. I was hoping that perhaps this time I might pick your brain about a few things, if there's time."
Andurian smiled. He never smiled. "I believe that can be arranged."
They were on a mission into a goblin lair that had previously been cleared by three groups of mostly steel tier adventurers. They weren't called the Scrip Scrappers because they took on high value jobs. Mostly they did cleanup tasks. Frequently, members 'graduated' up to new parties. Andurian spent the walk to the goblin lair talking with Samantha about the human body. The functions of all the organs, and tips and tricks for non-magical healing, but he noticeable changed the subject several times when it came to healing with magic.
As expected this mission went sideways. Getting to the supposedly cleared lair was no problem, however when they arrived it seemed all the corpses were already gone. Blood trails indicated something had dragged them all back into the lair, or possibly that they'd dragged themselves. Normally, Dean would have called it there, and for the sake of safety told the party to head back to town. A waste of a days rations and a time, better safe than dead. Something amiss like that is a sure sign of trouble... but Andurian spoke up.
"We need to go in there, no time to wait for reserve troops." And with that he strode forth, leaving the party racing to catch up. Healers and spellcaster types usually aren't in the front when exploring sketchy dungeons.
Once they were all comfortably inside, the entrance collapsed. Sealing them inside. Andurian didn't seem bothered, or even startled by this, which did help put the other seven people at ease, sorta. The lack of startle was... well startling in it's own way.
Rather than say anything to allay their growing anxiety, he said, "The only way out is forward." After which he did something that ratcheted up all their anxieties to eleven. He drew his sword. Andurian hadn't drawn his sword in the entire time he'd been around. He'd been said to have blocked a few attacks with it still in it's sheath, but never actually took it out.
She sang, that sword, a sort of ringing that never stopped after he pulled her out. Scarlet Aria was her name, and once unsheathed all seven Scrappers could feel her power washing over them, invigorating them, and enhancing their senses and breathing. She cast an eerie light, which made all the goblin blood sprayed about the room glow an unnatural green. There were smaller bits that glowed white.
He held his sword high, lighting up the entire space, "Fan out and have a look around. We're looking for any purple blood. Green is the goblinoids, white is humans, elves or dwarves. Purple is... my target."
A few minutes of searching and Harlan, the rogue found a tiny spot of glowing purple in a piece of rock on the ground that looked magically manipulated and called Andurian over. Harlan suspected an orc shaman had opened a tunnel here at some point.
For a moment there was a flash of anger on Andurian's face, but he quelled his emotions and said. "Stand back."
He placed his hand that had five rings on it a fist pointed straight down. The Scrappers all felt a pulse of magic unlike anything they'd ever encountered, suddenly they were all falling. Andurian's five rings destroyed themselves in their usage, but punched a large hole all the way down into the underdark, that land beneath the surface from which goblins and orcs come.
As they fell he swung his staff around and caught them all in a slow falling spell, so they alighted softly onto the stone wreckage below. pushing away the cloud of dust that came with them.
Slow falling was supposed to be a wizard's spell, or so they had all thought.
As the cloud of dust cleared and settled, They saw that they were well and truly surrounded by a throng of orcs and goblins. They had crashed down in the middle of some huge ritual or ceremony. Inside the surprisingly well lit cave were hundreds, maybe even a thousand orcs and goblins. And underneath the pile of rocks that they had followed were probably twenty or so dead ones.
Andurian smiled. Fresh ground goblin and orc would work perfectly. He activated the three remaining rings on his sword hand, and a glowing light surrounded all of his companions. "Fight like my life depends on it friends, and don't worry about the wounds."
The scrappers all felt stronger than ever, they all were stronger than ever. Whatever magic Andurian used had juiced them up real good. Dean leapt twelve feet in a single jump to block an arrow headed toward Andurian. And then he kicked an orc that was climbing up toward them hard enough that the orc's head exploded.
Samantha stood next to Andurian, what else was she going to do? Andy had taken an arrow in the neck and just ripped it out and the wound sealed up and he kept fighting. So she watched Andurian to try to learn. She watched him point with his staff at the growing mess of dead meat, and then she watched it begin to form up into a massive flesh golem.
"Y- Y- You're a Carnomancer!?"
"And so much more!" Andurian said as he channeled his power into the staff and his monstrous flesh abomination hopped into action. Unnervingly fast for something so large, it swept orcs and goblins by the dozen down to the floor and stomped across them. Every one slain adding to it's mass and power.
"But... What? How?!"
The Scrip Scrappers acquitted themselves well in battle. The enchantment he put on them was unreal.
Dave, the unarmored barbarian, used to be covered in somewhat debilitating burn scars. Those ancient scars had all vanished about a half second after the enchantment landed on him, and he felt as young as powerful as when he had slain the dragon that burnt him twenty years ago.
Dean's strength grew to match Dave's, and Harlan and Harriet both become so fast and deadly accurate with their ranged attacks that they were killing enemies so quickly that running out of arrows would have been a serious concern, if not for the orcs and goblins shooting plenty back at them. If they needed another one they'd just yoink it from their own thigh, or their friend's back and the wound would painlessly close. In fact getting peppered with arrows was only a minor itchy annoyance at worst while under Andurian's ring enhanced enchantment. It was not, however repairing their armor, which would be truly beat to hell by the end of the fight.
Val and Tilly, the two offensive spellcasters found their mana reserves to be overflowing, like they were wearing beer helmets with mana potions instead of beers, and just absolutely chugging while fighting.
Samantha would have got more out of the enchantment if she wasn't so dumbfounded by conversation with Andurian while the chaos around her unfolded.
"What the hell do you mean More than a Carnomancer! Everyone only gets one Mancy!" She shouted at him, mostly to get over the noise of the screaming goblinoid horde trying to kill them. An arrow stuck her in the neck and he reached pointed his sword at her and it sprang out and flew back at the one who shot it.
"No offense lady, but you people have it all so wrong about magic on this planet." He said, "Look, I can do any mancy I want."
Then he copied Val's Pyromancy only stronger, and lit a dozen green bodies below aflame with a gesture from his staff. Another staff swipe put a wall of ice spikes through a line of twenty enemies that was about to loose arrows their direction.
"What in the nine hells..." Samantha was struggling with this, Church Dogma said that those blessed with magic could only master one mancy, but Andurian had clearly mastered many. "What... what are you?"
Andurian pointed his staff toward his flesh monstrosity and it collapsed from a vaguely humanoid in shape to a massive blob with hundreds protruding of bone tentacles. The boney protrusions reached out and claimed any orc or goblin they could and started hurling them to awaiting mouths at the blob center.
"I'm A Space Wizard. From up there." He gestured upward with his eyes, "One of my ilk has stolen something from me and has been hiding on this planet, and I've finally found him. So you wanna know what I am? I'm fucking mad. He stole my godsdamned Familiar!"
There was a sudden powerful pulse of magic, the kind that the Scrip Scrappers had only ever felt around Andurian, but it came from within a neighboring chamber of the cave. The orcs and goblins had been slaughtered down to the point that they were fleeing en masse, and this, enemy Space Wizard, had also just retreated.
"Run if you want Rathius, you son of a bitch!" Andurian shouted into the cave. then he turned to Samantha to say, "He can't force a teleport with Flox, so he's gotta still be in here somewh-oof!"
Andurian's Familiar cut him off by flying into his chest at high speed and unceremoniously taking him clean off his feet. It was an almost two meter long flying noodly shaped dragon thing. Flox was black and purple, like his owner's robe. He had four limbs on bottom, front legs with thumbs on the hands, and back feet more like a cats. On his back were a pair of wings, though the way he flew he definitely didn't need use them. It seemed the laws of Physics were merely suggestions to Flox the dragonling Familiar.
Andurian sat up and pet the aggressively wiggly dragonling in his lap. "Okay buddy, I know... I missed you too." Flox licked him and nuzzled him like a dog that hadn't seen it's owner in weeks, and as Andurian calmed Flox down the creature started purring like a cat. Once the beast was purring Andurian collected his sword and sheathed it, and grabbed his staff back to help himself back to his feet Around them, the Scrip Scrappers had reassembled. The flesh monstrosity had collapsed into inert meat the instant Flox had made contact with Andurian. The ol' space Wizard just didn't have the rage left in his heart to maintain such a thing when his Familiar was back with him. Also, all the remaining enemies had all fled.
"Did you say you're a Space Wizard?" Val had overheard.
"Yeah, he did." Samantha confirmed, while plucking one of the few remaining arrows from Harriet's back. "He also has multiple mancies. Pyro, Cryo, Carno, and more from what I saw..."
Coming from the cleric, the healer, the representative of the church in the group, that was quite the statement.
Andurian sighed while wrapping his purring pet around his neck like a scarf, "The jig is up. I'm not from 'round here. I'm from up there, all the way up there. And I know far more about the true nature of magic than you land dwellers down here, what with that damn fool church teaching everyone everything wrong. "
He waited a few seconds to see if any of them would say anything, and much to his surprise, all three of the spell casters in the group started talking at once.
"Can I go with you."
"I want to see it."
"No fuckin way, prove it."
Andurian smiled. "Alright, alright. You non-casters are welcome to come too, you all have potential to learn magic, even Dave here, I'm afraid.
Dave laughed. "If you can prove that, then I'm this little critter's uncle."
All the Scrip Scrappers laughed. Then they suddenly stopped laughing as the roof of the cave above them ripped opened up and sunlight poured in.
"That'll be our ride." Andurian said. "You know, I wasn't planning to recruit anyone on this planet.... but you guys are alright, and Flox didn't raise his hackles to a single one of you. So you've all passed the hardest test already."
Gravity slowly reversed over a few second. The Scrip Scrappers started to panic but since Andurian did not, they left it at 'starting to panic' instead of full blown panic. They started floating upward, and Andurian simply pointed with his staff and applied burst of kinetic energy to the largest rocks trying to join them. His ship above began to do the same, pushing all the stone and rock away, leaving only himself and the Scrip Scrappers to be pulled inside his ship.
"Welcome aboard Captain." A woman's voice said from somewhere. "And welcome, new friends."
submitted by kiltedfrog to AFrogWroteThis [link] [comments]
He'd made himself well known around town when he appeared out of no where and saved the lives of a handful of Steel Tier Adventurers after they killed the Tyrannus Lizard. It had bit their healer in half during the battle and somehow he even saved her too.
Vincent the Brave had introduced him to the guild, and he immediately signed up. Everyone starts at Tin tier, but Andurian rose up the ranks quickly. Clearly his ability to mend flesh was second to none, and he never seemed to tired from casting like most healers. When he wasn't out adventuring he worked, FOR FREE, at the medical clinic.
Well... Free in terms of currency, what he was really getting paid in was information. Every adventurer he healed talked with him, told him anything he wanted to know. He was, after all, the only healer that includes pain killing magic with his heals. Most healers will stitch you back together through screaming pain, but Andurian will put your whole damn arm back on and somehow give you an Armgasm as the same time.
Rumors about him spread too, far and wide. Six months after he arrived the first Adamantine adventurers started showing up at our town trying to recruit him. He was still technically only an Iron tier Adventurer when he turned down the Falconeer and her crew. Terrestria and the Earthlings also got shot down, though he did cure two of the Earthlings of a fungal infection they'd had for nigh on a decade that their old healer said was 'Impossible to fix'.
Andurian never permanently joined a party, at least for nine month he hadn't. He'd do one job with a random party here, and another there, nothing that was supposed to get too terribly dangerous, though the missions he chose always seemed to get out of hand somehow. Randomly coming across an undead horde, or a lindwyrm, or a pack of dire wolves. The tales the returning adventurers would tell would be fantastical. Tanks cut clean in two, and restored in mere seconds, back to fully fighting fit. Or an arm that was reattached from a distance, unlike other healers he didn't need to be touching you to heal. He never seemed to attack, he would use his staff to defend himself if a stray goblin or wolf came at him. Parrying and dodging while still healing, until help arrived to slay whatever it was attacking him.
The rumors about this man had become so powerful that if he asked to join your party you almost couldn't say no. Was it probably going to be one hell of a mission gone sideways? Almost assuredly. Would everyone survive? Also, without a doubt, so long as the man in the black and purple robes came with. Parties that had gone out and had haywire adventures with Andurian also seemed to level up pretty quickly afterward. The Tigers went from Bronze to Steel as a party within two months of their time with him, and that was pretty much the typical result.
Also, he'd never been said to join the same party twice. So the Scrip Scrappers were quite surprised when he approached their table at the tavern the day before their first mission out after their 'turn' being bless by him.
"I am coming with you." He told them, a serious look on his face. the entire tavern silenced to listen in. They all knew this was odd... odder than normal with Andurian.
Dean, the leader of the Scrip Scrappers swallowed hard into the sudden silence. "I... Uhm. What?" He wasn't mentally ready to be devoured whole by another Grunchalope Alpha, or whatever the future happened to have in store for him on this adventure out with Andurian.
"I am coming with you." Andurian repeated. "Your party will need me."
He never explained why he was joining parties, he just told them he joining. Dean's face drained of all color.
Samantha, the Scrip Scrappers regular healer smiled and placed her a hand on Dean's shoulder. "We would be honored to have you along again. I was hoping that perhaps this time I might pick your brain about a few things, if there's time."
Andurian smiled. He never smiled. "I believe that can be arranged."
They were on a mission into a goblin lair that had previously been cleared by three groups of mostly steel tier adventurers. They weren't called the Scrip Scrappers because they took on high value jobs. Mostly they did cleanup tasks. Frequently, members 'graduated' up to new parties. Andurian spent the walk to the goblin lair talking with Samantha about the human body. The functions of all the organs, and tips and tricks for non-magical healing, but he noticeable changed the subject several times when it came to healing with magic.
As expected this mission went sideways. Getting to the supposedly cleared lair was no problem, however when they arrived it seemed all the corpses were already gone. Blood trails indicated something had dragged them all back into the lair, or possibly that they'd dragged themselves. Normally, Dean would have called it there, and for the sake of safety told the party to head back to town. A waste of a days rations and a time, better safe than dead. Something amiss like that is a sure sign of trouble... but Andurian spoke up.
"We need to go in there, no time to wait for reserve troops." And with that he strode forth, leaving the party racing to catch up. Healers and spellcaster types usually aren't in the front when exploring sketchy dungeons.
Once they were all comfortably inside, the entrance collapsed. Sealing them inside. Andurian didn't seem bothered, or even startled by this, which did help put the other seven people at ease, sorta. The lack of startle was... well startling in it's own way.
Rather than say anything to allay their growing anxiety, he said, "The only way out is forward." After which he did something that ratcheted up all their anxieties to eleven. He drew his sword. Andurian hadn't drawn his sword in the entire time he'd been around. He'd been said to have blocked a few attacks with it still in it's sheath, but never actually took it out.
She sang, that sword, a sort of ringing that never stopped after he pulled her out. Scarlet Aria was her name, and once unsheathed all seven Scrappers could feel her power washing over them, invigorating them, and enhancing their senses and breathing. She cast an eerie light, which made all the goblin blood sprayed about the room glow an unnatural green. There were smaller bits that glowed white.
He held his sword high, lighting up the entire space, "Fan out and have a look around. We're looking for any purple blood. Green is the goblinoids, white is humans, elves or dwarves. Purple is... my target."
A few minutes of searching and Harlan, the rogue found a tiny spot of glowing purple in a piece of rock on the ground that looked magically manipulated and called Andurian over. Harlan suspected an orc shaman had opened a tunnel here at some point.
For a moment there was a flash of anger on Andurian's face, but he quelled his emotions and said. "Stand back."
He placed his hand that had five rings on it a fist pointed straight down. The Scrappers all felt a pulse of magic unlike anything they'd ever encountered, suddenly they were all falling. Andurian's five rings destroyed themselves in their usage, but punched a large hole all the way down into the underdark, that land beneath the surface from which goblins and orcs come.
As they fell he swung his staff around and caught them all in a slow falling spell, so they alighted softly onto the stone wreckage below. pushing away the cloud of dust that came with them.
Slow falling was supposed to be a wizard's spell, or so they had all thought.
As the cloud of dust cleared and settled, They saw that they were well and truly surrounded by a throng of orcs and goblins. They had crashed down in the middle of some huge ritual or ceremony. Inside the surprisingly well lit cave were hundreds, maybe even a thousand orcs and goblins. And underneath the pile of rocks that they had followed were probably twenty or so dead ones.
Andurian smiled. Fresh ground goblin and orc would work perfectly. He activated the three remaining rings on his sword hand, and a glowing light surrounded all of his companions. "Fight like my life depends on it friends, and don't worry about the wounds."
The scrappers all felt stronger than ever, they all were stronger than ever. Whatever magic Andurian used had juiced them up real good. Dean leapt twelve feet in a single jump to block an arrow headed toward Andurian. And then he kicked an orc that was climbing up toward them hard enough that the orc's head exploded.
Samantha stood next to Andurian, what else was she going to do? Andy had taken an arrow in the neck and just ripped it out and the wound sealed up and he kept fighting. So she watched Andurian to try to learn. She watched him point with his staff at the growing mess of dead meat, and then she watched it begin to form up into a massive flesh golem.
"Y- Y- You're a Carnomancer!?"
"And so much more!" Andurian said as he channeled his power into the staff and his monstrous flesh abomination hopped into action. Unnervingly fast for something so large, it swept orcs and goblins by the dozen down to the floor and stomped across them. Every one slain adding to it's mass and power.
"But... What? How?!"
The Scrip Scrappers acquitted themselves well in battle. The enchantment he put on them was unreal.
Dave, the unarmored barbarian, used to be covered in somewhat debilitating burn scars. Those ancient scars had all vanished about a half second after the enchantment landed on him, and he felt as young as powerful as when he had slain the dragon that burnt him twenty years ago.
Dean's strength grew to match Dave's, and Harlan and Harriet both become so fast and deadly accurate with their ranged attacks that they were killing enemies so quickly that running out of arrows would have been a serious concern, if not for the orcs and goblins shooting plenty back at them. If they needed another one they'd just yoink it from their own thigh, or their friend's back and the wound would painlessly close. In fact getting peppered with arrows was only a minor itchy annoyance at worst while under Andurian's ring enhanced enchantment. It was not, however repairing their armor, which would be truly beat to hell by the end of the fight.
Val and Tilly, the two offensive spellcasters found their mana reserves to be overflowing, like they were wearing beer helmets with mana potions instead of beers, and just absolutely chugging while fighting.
Samantha would have got more out of the enchantment if she wasn't so dumbfounded by conversation with Andurian while the chaos around her unfolded.
"What the hell do you mean More than a Carnomancer! Everyone only gets one Mancy!" She shouted at him, mostly to get over the noise of the screaming goblinoid horde trying to kill them. An arrow stuck her in the neck and he reached pointed his sword at her and it sprang out and flew back at the one who shot it.
"No offense lady, but you people have it all so wrong about magic on this planet." He said, "Look, I can do any mancy I want."
Then he copied Val's Pyromancy only stronger, and lit a dozen green bodies below aflame with a gesture from his staff. Another staff swipe put a wall of ice spikes through a line of twenty enemies that was about to loose arrows their direction.
"What in the nine hells..." Samantha was struggling with this, Church Dogma said that those blessed with magic could only master one mancy, but Andurian had clearly mastered many. "What... what are you?"
Andurian pointed his staff toward his flesh monstrosity and it collapsed from a vaguely humanoid in shape to a massive blob with hundreds protruding of bone tentacles. The boney protrusions reached out and claimed any orc or goblin they could and started hurling them to awaiting mouths at the blob center.
"I'm A Space Wizard. From up there." He gestured upward with his eyes, "One of my ilk has stolen something from me and has been hiding on this planet, and I've finally found him. So you wanna know what I am? I'm fucking mad. He stole my godsdamned Familiar!"
There was a sudden powerful pulse of magic, the kind that the Scrip Scrappers had only ever felt around Andurian, but it came from within a neighboring chamber of the cave. The orcs and goblins had been slaughtered down to the point that they were fleeing en masse, and this, enemy Space Wizard, had also just retreated.
"Run if you want Rathius, you son of a bitch!" Andurian shouted into the cave. then he turned to Samantha to say, "He can't force a teleport with Flox, so he's gotta still be in here somewh-oof!"
Andurian's Familiar cut him off by flying into his chest at high speed and unceremoniously taking him clean off his feet. It was an almost two meter long flying noodly shaped dragon thing. Flox was black and purple, like his owner's robe. He had four limbs on bottom, front legs with thumbs on the hands, and back feet more like a cats. On his back were a pair of wings, though the way he flew he definitely didn't need use them. It seemed the laws of Physics were merely suggestions to Flox the dragonling Familiar.
Andurian sat up and pet the aggressively wiggly dragonling in his lap. "Okay buddy, I know... I missed you too." Flox licked him and nuzzled him like a dog that hadn't seen it's owner in weeks, and as Andurian calmed Flox down the creature started purring like a cat. Once the beast was purring Andurian collected his sword and sheathed it, and grabbed his staff back to help himself back to his feet Around them, the Scrip Scrappers had reassembled. The flesh monstrosity had collapsed into inert meat the instant Flox had made contact with Andurian. The ol' space Wizard just didn't have the rage left in his heart to maintain such a thing when his Familiar was back with him. Also, all the remaining enemies had all fled.
"Did you say you're a Space Wizard?" Val had overheard.
"Yeah, he did." Samantha confirmed, while plucking one of the few remaining arrows from Harriet's back. "He also has multiple mancies. Pyro, Cryo, Carno, and more from what I saw..."
Coming from the cleric, the healer, the representative of the church in the group, that was quite the statement.
Andurian sighed while wrapping his purring pet around his neck like a scarf, "The jig is up. I'm not from 'round here. I'm from up there, all the way up there. And I know far more about the true nature of magic than you land dwellers down here, what with that damn fool church teaching everyone everything wrong. "
He waited a few seconds to see if any of them would say anything, and much to his surprise, all three of the spell casters in the group started talking at once.
"Can I go with you."
"I want to see it."
"No fuckin way, prove it."
Andurian smiled. "Alright, alright. You non-casters are welcome to come too, you all have potential to learn magic, even Dave here, I'm afraid.
Dave laughed. "If you can prove that, then I'm this little critter's uncle."
All the Scrip Scrappers laughed. Then they suddenly stopped laughing as the roof of the cave above them ripped opened up and sunlight poured in.
"That'll be our ride." Andurian said. "You know, I wasn't planning to recruit anyone on this planet.... but you guys are alright, and Flox didn't raise his hackles to a single one of you. So you've all passed the hardest test already."
Gravity slowly reversed over a few second. The Scrip Scrappers started to panic but since Andurian did not, they left it at 'starting to panic' instead of full blown panic. They started floating upward, and Andurian simply pointed with his staff and applied burst of kinetic energy to the largest rocks trying to join them. His ship above began to do the same, pushing all the stone and rock away, leaving only himself and the Scrip Scrappers to be pulled inside his ship.
"Welcome aboard Captain." A woman's voice said from somewhere. "And welcome, new friends."